Title: Vera
Author: Von Arnim, Elizabeth
Language: English
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VERA



BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"



MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1921



I


When the doctor had gone, and the two women from the village he had been
waiting for were upstairs shut in with her dead father, Lucy went out
into the garden and stood leaning on the gate staring at the sea.

Her father had died at nine o'clock that morning, and it was now twelve.
The sun beat on her bare head; and the burnt-up grass along the top of
the cliff, and the dusty road that passed the gate, and the glittering
sea, and the few white clouds hanging in the sky, all blazed and glared
in an extremity of silent, motionless heat and light.

Into this emptiness Lucy stared, motionless herself, as if she had been
carved in stone. There was not a sail on the sea, nor a line of distant
smoke from any steamer, neither was there once the flash of a bird's
wing brushing across the sky. Movement seemed smitten rigid. Sound
seemed to have gone to sleep.

Lucy stood staring at the sea, her face as empty of expression as the
bright blank world before her. Her father had been dead three hours, and
she felt nothing.

It was just a week since they had arrived in Cornwall, she and he, full
of hope, full of pleasure in the pretty little furnished house they had
taken for August and September, full of confidence in the good the pure
air was going to do him. But there had always been confidence; there
had never been a moment during the long years of his fragility when
confidence had even been questioned. He was delicate, and she had taken
care of him. She had taken care of him and he had been delicate ever
since she could remember. And ever since she could remember he had been
everything in life to her. She had had no thought since she grew up for
anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so
completely did he fill her heart. They had done everything together,
shared everything together, dodged the winters together, settled in
charming places, seen the same beautiful things, read the same books,
talked, laughed, had friends,--heaps of friends; wherever they were her
father seemed at once to have friends, adding them to the mass he had
already. She had not been away from him a day for years; she had had no
wish to go away. Where and with whom could she be so happy as with him?
All the years were years of sunshine. There had been no winters; nothing
but summer, summer, and sweet scents and soft skies, and patient
understanding with her slowness--for he had the nimblest mind--and love.
He was the most amusing companion to her, the most generous friend, the
most illuminating guide, the most adoring father; and now he was dead,
and she felt nothing.

Her father. Dead. For ever.

She said the words over to herself. They meant nothing.

She was going to be alone. Without him. Always.

She said the words over to herself. They meant nothing.

Up in that room with its windows wide open, shut away from her with the
two village women, he was lying dead. He had smiled at her for the last
time, said all he was ever going to say to her, called her the last of
the sweet, half-teasing names he loved to invent for her. Why, only a
few hours ago they were having breakfast together and planning what they
would do that day. Why, only yesterday they drove together after tea
towards the sunset, and he had seen, with his quick eyes that saw
everything, some unusual grasses by the road-side, and had stopped and
gathered them, excited to find such rare ones, and had taken them back
with him to study, and had explained them to her and made her see
profoundly interesting, important things in them, in these grasses
which, till he touched them, had seemed just grasses. That is what he
did with everything,--touched it into life and delight. The grasses lay
in the dining-room now, waiting for him to work on them, spread out
where he had put them on some blotting-paper in the window. She had seen
them as she came through on her way to the garden; and she had seen,
too, that the breakfast was still there, the breakfast they had had
together, still as they had left it, forgotten by the servants in the
surprise of death. He had fallen down as he got up from it. Dead. In an
instant. No time for anything, for a cry, for a look. Gone. Finished.
Wiped out.

What a beautiful day it was; and so hot. He loved heat. They were lucky
in the weather....

Yes, there were sounds after all,--she suddenly noticed them; sounds
from the room upstairs, a busy moving about of discreet footsteps, the
splash of water, crockery being carefully set down. Presently the women
would come and tell her everything was ready, and she could go back to
him again. The women had tried to comfort her when they arrived; and so
had the servants, and so had the doctor. Comfort her! And she felt
nothing.

Lucy stared at the sea, thinking these things, examining the situation
as a curious one but unconnected with herself, looking at it with a kind
of cold comprehension. Her mind was quite clear. Every detail of what
had happened was sharply before her. She knew everything, and she felt
nothing,--like God, she said to herself; yes, exactly like God.

Footsteps came along the road, which was hidden by the garden's fringe
of trees and bushes for fifty yards on either side of the gate, and
presently a man passed between her eyes and the sea. She did not notice
him, for she was noticing nothing but her thoughts, and he passed in
front of her quite close, and was gone.

But he had seen her, and had stared hard at her for the brief instant it
took to pass the gate. Her face and its expression had surprised him.
He was not a very observant man, and at that moment was even less so
than usual, for he was particularly and deeply absorbed in his own
affairs; yet when he came suddenly on the motionless figure at the gate,
with its wide-open eyes that simply looked through him as he went by,
unconscious, obviously, that any one was going by, his attention was
surprised away from himself and almost he had stopped to examine the
strange creature more closely. His code, however, prevented that, and he
continued along the further fifty yards of bushes and trees that hid the
other half of the garden from the road, but more slowly, slower and
slower, till at the end of the garden where the road left it behind and
went on very solitarily over the bare grass on the top of the cliffs,
winding in and out with the ins and outs of the coast for as far as one
could see, he hesitated, looked back, went on a yard or two, hesitated
again, stopped and took off his hot hat and wiped his forehead, looked
at the bare country and the long twisting glare of the road ahead, and
then very slowly turned and went past the belt of bushes towards the
gate again.

He said to himself as he went: 'My God, I'm so lonely. I can't stand it.
I must speak to some one. I shall go off my head----'

For what had happened to this man--his name was Wemyss--was that public
opinion was forcing him into retirement and inactivity at the very time
when he most needed company and distraction. He had to go away by
himself, he had to withdraw for at the very least a week from his
ordinary life, from his house on the river where he had just begun his
summer holiday, from his house in London where at least there were his
clubs, because of this determination on the part of public opinion that
he should for a space be alone with his sorrow. Alone with sorrow,--of
all ghastly things for a man to be alone with! It was an outrage, he
felt, to condemn a man to that; it was the cruellest form of solitary
confinement. He had come to Cornwall because it took a long time to get
to, a whole day in the train there and a whole day in the train back,
clipping the week, the minimum of time public opinion insisted on for
respecting his bereavement, at both ends; but still that left five days
of awful loneliness, of wandering about the cliffs by himself trying not
to think, without a soul to speak to, without a thing to do. He couldn't
play bridge because of public opinion. Everybody knew what had happened
to him. It had been in all the papers. The moment he said his name they
would know. It was so recent. Only last week....

No, he couldn't bear this, he must speak to some one. That girl,--with
those strange eyes she wasn't just ordinary. She wouldn't mind letting
him talk to her for a little, perhaps sit in the garden with her a
little. She would understand.

Wemyss was like a child in his misery. He very nearly cried outright
when he got to the gate and took off his hat, and the girl looked at him
blankly just as if she still didn't see him and hadn't heard him when he
said, 'Could you let me have a glass of water? I--it's so hot----'

He began to stammer because of her eyes. 'I--I'm horribly thirsty--the
heat----'

He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He certainly
looked very hot. His face was red and distressed, and his forehead
dripped. He was all puckered, like an unhappy baby. And the girl looked
so cool, so bloodlessly cool. Her hands, folded on the top bar of the
gate, looked more than cool, they looked cold; like hands in winter,
shrunk and small with cold. She had bobbed hair, he noticed, so that it
was impossible to tell how old she was, brown hair from which the sun
was beating out bright lights; and her small face had no colour except
those wide eyes fixed on his and the colour of her rather big mouth; but
even her mouth seemed frozen.

'Would it be much bother----' began Wemyss again; and then his situation
overwhelmed him.

'You would be doing a greater kindness than you know,' he said, his
voice trembling with unhappiness, 'if you would let me come into the
garden a minute and rest.'

At the sound of the genuine wretchedness in his voice Lucy's blank eyes
became a little human. It got through to her consciousness that this
distressed warm stranger was appealing to her for something.

'Are you so hot?' she asked, really seeing him for the first time.

'Yes, I'm hot,' said Wemyss. 'But it isn't that. I've had a
misfortune--a terrible misfortune----'

He paused, overcome by the remembrance of it, by the unfairness of so
much horror having overtaken him.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' said Lucy vaguely, still miles away from him, deep in
indifference. 'Have you lost anything?'

'Good God, not that sort of misfortune!' cried Wemyss. 'Let me come in a
minute--into the garden a minute--just to sit a minute with a human
being. You would be doing a great kindness. Because you're a stranger I
can talk to you about it if you'll let me. Just because we're strangers
I could talk. I haven't spoken to a soul but servants and official
people since--since it happened. For two days I haven't spoken at all to
a living soul--I shall go mad----'

His voice shook again with his unhappiness, with his astonishment at his
unhappiness.

Lucy didn't think two days very long not to speak to anybody in, but
there was something overwhelming about the strange man's evident
affliction that roused her out of her apathy; not much,--she was still
profoundly detached, observing from another world, as it were, this
extreme heat and agitation, but at least she saw him now, she did with a
faint curiosity consider him. He was like some elemental force in his
directness. He had the quality of an irresistible natural phenomenon.
But she did not move from her position at the gate, and her eyes
continued, with the unwaveringness he thought so odd, to stare into his.

'I would gladly have let you come in,' she said, 'if you had come
yesterday, but to-day my father died.'

Wemyss looked at her in astonishment. She had said it in as level and
ordinary a voice as if she had been remarking, rather indifferently, on
the weather.

Then he had a moment of insight. His own calamity had illuminated him.
He who had never known pain, who had never let himself be worried, who
had never let himself be approached in his life by a doubt, had for the
last week lived in an atmosphere of worry and pain, and of what, if he
allowed himself to think, to become morbid, might well grow into a most
unfair, tormenting doubt. He understood, as he would not have understood
a week ago, what her whole attitude, her rigidity meant. He stared at
her a moment while she stared straight back at him, and then his big
warm hands dropped on to the cold ones folded on the top bar of the
gate, and he said, holding them firmly though they made no attempt to
move, 'So that's it. So that's why. Now I know.'

And then he added, with the simplicity his own situation was putting
into everything he did, 'That settles it. We two stricken ones must talk
together.'

And still covering her hands with one of his, with the other he
unlatched the gate and walked in.



II


There was a seat under a mulberry tree on the little lawn, with its back
to the house and the gaping windows, and Wemyss, spying it out, led Lucy
to it as if she were a child, holding her by the hand.

She went with him indifferently. What did it matter whether she sat
under the mulberry tree or stood at the gate? This convulsed
stranger--was he real? Was anything real? Let him tell her whatever it
was he wanted to tell her, and she would listen, and get him his glass
of water, and then he would go his way and by that time the women would
have finished upstairs and she could be with her father again.

'I'll fetch the water,' she said when they got to the seat.

'No. Sit down,' said Wemyss.

She sat down. So did he, letting her hand go. It dropped on the seat,
palm upwards, between them.

'It's strange our coming across each other like this,' he said, looking
at her while she looked indifferently straight in front of her at the
sun on the grass beyond the shade of the mulberry tree, at a mass of
huge fuchsia bushes a little way off. 'I've been going through hell--and
so must you have been. Good God, what hell! Do you mind if I tell you?
You'll understand because of your own----'

Lucy didn't mind. She didn't mind anything. She merely vaguely wondered
that he should think she had been going through hell. Hell and her
darling father; how quaint it sounded. She began to suspect that she was
asleep. All this wasn't really happening. Her father wasn't dead.
Presently the housemaid would come in with the hot water and wake her to
the usual cheerful day. The man sitting beside her,--he seemed rather
vivid for a dream, it was true; so detailed, with his flushed face and
the perspiration on his forehead, besides the feel of his big warm hand
a moment ago and the small puffs of heat that came from his clothes when
he moved. But it was so unlikely ... everything that had happened since
breakfast was so _unlikely_. This man, too, would resolve himself soon
into just something she had had for dinner last night, and she would
tell her father about her dream at breakfast, and they would laugh.

She stirred uneasily. It wasn't a dream. It was real.

'The story is unbelievably horrible,' Wemyss was saying in a high
aggrievement, looking at her little head with the straight cut hair, and
her grave profile. How old was she? Eighteen? Twenty-eight? Impossible
to tell exactly with hair cut like that, but young anyhow compared to
him; very young perhaps compared to him who was well over forty, and so
much scarred, so deeply scarred, by this terrible thing that had
happened to him.

'It's so horrible that I wouldn't talk about it if you were going to
mind,' he went on, 'but you can't mind because you're a stranger, and it
may help you with your own trouble, because whatever you may suffer I'm
suffering much worse, so then you'll see yours isn't so bad. And besides
I must talk to some one I should go mad----'

This was certainly a dream, thought Lucy. Things didn't happen like this
when one was awake,--grotesque things.

She turned her head and looked at him. No, it wasn't a dream. No dream
could be so solid as the man beside her. What was he saying?

He was saying in a tormented voice that he was Wemyss.

'You are Wemyss,' she repeated gravely.

It made no impression on her. She didn't mind his being Wemyss.

'I'm the Wemyss the newspapers were full of last week,' he said, seeing
that the name left her unmoved. 'My God,' he went on, again wiping his
forehead, but as fast as he wiped it more beads burst out, 'those
posters to see one's own name staring at one everywhere on posters!'

'Why was your name on posters?' said Lucy.

She didn't want to know; she asked mechanically, her ear attentive only
to the sounds from the open windows of the room upstairs.

'Don't you read newspapers here?' was his answer.

'I don't think we do,' she said, listening. 'We've been settling in. I
don't think we've remembered to order any newspapers yet.'

A look of some, at any rate, relief from the pressure he was evidently
struggling under came into Wemyss's face. 'Then I can tell you the real
version,' he said, 'without you're being already filled up with the
monstrous suggestions that were made at the inquest. As though I hadn't
suffered enough as it was! As though it hadn't been terrible enough
already----'

'The inquest?' repeated Lucy.

Again she turned her head and looked at him. 'Has your trouble anything
to do with death?'

'Why, you don't suppose anything else would reduce me to the state I'm
in?'

'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said; and into her eyes and into her voice came a
different expression, something living, something gentle. 'I hope it
wasn't anybody you--loved?'

'It was my wife,' said Wemyss.

He got up quickly, so near was he to crying at the thought of it, at the
thought of all he had endured, and turned his back on her and began
stripping the leaves off the branches above his head.

Lucy watched him, leaning forward a little on both hands. 'Tell me about
it,' she said presently, very gently.

He came back and dropped down heavily beside her again, and with many
interjections of astonishment that such a ghastly calamity could have
happened to him, to him who till now had never----

'Yes,' said Lucy, comprehendingly and gravely, 'yes--I know----'

--had never had anything to do with--well, with calamities, he told her
the story.

They had gone down, he and his wife, as they did every 25th of July, for
the summer to their house on the river, and he had been looking forward
to a glorious time of peaceful doing nothing after months of London,
just lying about in a punt and reading and smoking and resting--London
was an awful place for tiring one out--and they hadn't been there
twenty-four hours before his wife--before his wife----

The remembrance of it was too grievous to him. He couldn't go on.

'Was she--very ill?' asked Lucy gently, to give him time to recover. 'I
think that would almost be better. One would be a little at least one
would be a little prepared----'

'She wasn't ill at all,' cried Wemyss. 'She just--died.'

'Oh like father!' exclaimed Lucy, roused now altogether. It was she now
who laid her hand on his.

Wemyss seized it between both his, and went on quickly.

He was writing letters, he said, in the library at his table in the
window where he could see the terrace and the garden and the river; they
had had tea together only an hour before; there was a flagged terrace
along that side of the house, the side the library was on and all the
principal rooms; and all of a sudden there was a great flash of shadow
between him and the light; come and gone instantaneously; and
instantaneously then there was a thud; he would never forget it, that
thud; and there outside his window on the flags----

'Oh don't--oh don't----' gasped Lucy.

'It was my wife,' Wemyss hurried on, not able now to stop, looking at
Lucy while he talked with eyes of amazed horror. 'Fallen out of the top
room of the house her sitting-room because of the view--it was in a
straight line with the library window--she dropped past my window like a
stone--she was smashed--smashed----'

'Oh, don't--oh----'

'Now can you wonder at the state I'm in?' he cried. 'Can you wonder if
I'm nearly off my head? And forced to be by myself--forced into
retirement for what the world considers a proper period of mourning,
with nothing to think of but that ghastly inquest.'

He hurt her hand, he gripped it so hard.

'If you hadn't let me come and talk to you,' he said, 'I believe I'd
have pitched myself over the cliff there this afternoon and made an end
of it.'

'But how--but why--how could she fall?' whispered Lucy, to whom poor
Wemyss's misfortune seemed more frightful than anything she had ever
heard of.

She hung on his words, her eyes on his face, her lips parted, her whole
body an agony of sympathy. Life--how terrible it was, and how
unsuspected. One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful
day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was
death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending,
death waiting. Her father, so full of love and interests and
plans,--gone, finished, brushed away as if he no more mattered than some
insect one unseeingly treads on as one walks; and this man's wife, dead
in an instant, dead so far more cruelly, so horribly....

'I had often told her to be careful of that window,' Wemyss answered in
a voice that almost sounded like anger; but all the time his tone had
been one of high anger at the wanton, outrageous cruelty of fate. 'It
was a very low one, and the floor was slippery. Oak. Every floor in my
house is polished oak. I had them put in myself. She must have been
leaning out and her feet slipped away behind her. That would make her
fall head foremost----'

'Oh--oh----' said Lucy, shrinking. What could she do, what could she say
to help him, to soften at least these dreadful memories?

'And then,' Wemyss went on after a moment, as unaware as Lucy was that
she was tremblingly stroking his hand, 'at the inquest, as though it
hadn't all been awful enough for me already, the jury must actually get
wrangling about the cause of death.'

'The cause of death?' echoed Lucy. 'But--she fell.'

'Whether it were an accident or done on purpose.'

'Done on----?'

'Suicide.'

'Oh----'

She drew in her breath quickly.

'But--it wasn't?'

'How could it be? She was my wife, without a care in the world,
everything done for her, no troubles, nothing on her mind, nothing wrong
with her health. We had been married fifteen years, and I was devoted to
her--devoted to her.'

He banged his knee with his free hand. His voice was full of indignant
tears.

'Then why did the jury----'

'My wife had a fool of a maid--I never could stand that woman--and it
was something she said at the inquest, some invention or other about
what my wife had said to her. You know what servants are. It upset
some of the jury. You know juries are made up of anybody and
everybody--butcher, baker, and candle-stick-maker--quite uneducated most
of them, quite at the mercy of any suggestion. And so instead of a
verdict of death by misadventure, which would have been the right one,
it was an open verdict.'

'Oh, how terrible--how terrible for you,' breathed Lucy, her eyes on
his, her mouth twitching with sympathy.

'You'd have seen all about it if you had read the papers last week,'
said Wemyss, more quietly. It had done him good to get it out and talked
over.

He looked down at her upturned face with its horror-stricken eyes and
twitching mouth. 'Now tell me about yourself,' he said, touched with
compunction; nothing that had happened to her could be so horrible as
what had happened to him, still she too was newly smitten, they had met
on a common ground of disaster, Death himself had been their introducer.

'Is life all--only death?' she breathed, her horror-stricken eyes on
his.

Before he could answer--and what was there to answer to such a question
except that of course it wasn't, and he and she were just victims of a
monstrous special unfairness,--he certainly was; her father had probably
died as fathers did, in the usual way in his bed--before he could
answer, the two women came out of the house, and with small discreet
steps proceeded down the path to the gate. The sun flooded their spare
figures and their decent black clothes, clothes kept for these occasions
as a mark of respectful sympathy.

One of them saw Lucy under the mulberry tree and hesitated, and then
came across the grass to her with the mincing steps of tact.

'Here's somebody coming to speak to you,' said Wemyss, for Lucy was
sitting with her back to the path.

She started and looked round.

The woman approached hesitatingly, her head on one side, her hands
folded, her face pulled into a little smile intended to convey
encouragement and pity.

'The gentleman's quite ready, miss,' she said softly.



III


All that day and all the next day Wemyss was Lucy's tower of strength
and rock of refuge. He did everything that had to be done of the
business part of death--that extra wantonness of misery thrown in so
grimly to finish off the crushing of a mourner who is alone. It is true
the doctor was kind and ready to help, but he was a complete stranger;
she had never seen him till he was fetched that dreadful morning; and he
had other things to see to besides her affairs,--his own patients,
scattered widely over a lonely countryside. Wemyss had nothing to see
to. He could concentrate entirely on Lucy. And he was her friend, linked
to her so strangely and so strongly by death. She felt she had known him
for ever. She felt that since the beginning of time she and he had been
advancing hand in hand towards just this place, towards just this house
and garden, towards just this year, this August, this moment of
existence.

Wemyss dropped quite naturally into the place a near male relative would
have been in if there had been a near male relative within reach; and
his relief at having something to do, something practical and immediate,
was so immense that never were funeral arrangements made with greater
zeal and energy,--really one might almost say with greater gusto. Fresh
from the horrors of those other funeral arrangements, clouded as
they had been by the silences of friends and the averted looks of
neighbours--all owing to the idiotic jurors and their hesitations, and
the vindictiveness of that woman because, he concluded, he had refused
to raise her wages the previous month--what he was arranging now was so
simple and straightforward that it positively was a pleasure. There were
no anxieties, there were no worries, and there was a grateful little
girl. After each fruitful visit to the undertaker, and he paid several
in his zeal, he came back to Lucy and she was grateful; and she was not
only grateful, but very obviously glad to get him back.

He saw she didn't like it when he went away, off along the top of the
cliff on his various business visits, purpose in each step, a different
being from the indignantly miserable person who had dragged about that
very cliff killing time such a little while before; he could see she
didn't like it. She knew he had to go, she was grateful and immensely
expressive of her gratitude--Wemyss thought he had never met any one so
expressively grateful--that he should so diligently go, but she didn't
like it. He saw she didn't like it; he saw that she clung to him; and it
pleased him.

'Don't be long,' she murmured each time, looking at him with eyes of
entreaty; and when he got back, and stood before her again mopping his
forehead, having triumphantly advanced the funeral arrangements another
stage, a faint colour came into her face and she had the relieved eyes
of a child who has been left alone in the dark and sees its mother
coming in with a candle. Vera usedn't to look like that. Vera had
accepted everything he did for her as a matter of course.

Naturally he wasn't going to let the poor little girl sleep alone in
that house with a dead body, and the strange servants who had been hired
together with the house and knew nothing either about her or her father
probably getting restive as night drew on, and as likely as not bolting
to the village; so he fetched his things from the primitive hotel down
in the cove about seven o'clock and announced his intention of sleeping
on the drawing-room sofa. He had lunched with her, and had had tea with
her, and now was going to dine with her. What she would have done
without him Wemyss couldn't think.

He felt he was being delicate and tactful in this about the drawing-room
sofa. He might fairly have claimed the spare-room bed; but he wasn't
going to take any advantage, not the smallest, of the poor little girl's
situation. The servants, who supposed him to be a relation and had
supposed him to be that from the first moment they saw him, big and
middle-aged, holding the young lady's hand under the mulberry tree,
were surprised at having to make up a bed in the drawing-room when there
were two spare-rooms with beds already in them upstairs, but did so
obediently, vaguely imagining it had something to do with watchfulness
and French windows; and Lucy, when he told her he was going to stay
the night, was so grateful, so really thankful, that her eyes, red
from the waves of grief that had engulfed her at intervals during the
afternoon--ever since, that is, the sight of her dead father lying
so remote from her, so wrapped, it seemed, in a deep, absorbed
attentiveness, had unfrozen her and swept her away into a sea of
passionate weeping--filled again with tears.

'Oh,' she murmured, 'how _good_ you are----'

It was Wemyss who had done all the thinking for her, and in the spare
moments between his visits to the undertaker about the arrangements, and
to the doctor about the certificate, and to the vicar about the burial,
had telegraphed to her only existing relative, an aunt, had sent the
obituary notice to _The Times_, and had even reminded her that she had
on a blue frock and asked if she hadn't better put on a black one; and
now this last instance of his thoughtfulness overwhelmed her.

She had been dreading the night, hardly daring to think of it so much
did she dread it; and each time he had gone away on his errands, through
her heart crept the thought of what it would be like when dusk came and
he went away for the last time and she would be alone, all alone in the
silent house, and upstairs that strange, wonderful, absorbed thing that
used to be her father, and whatever happened to her, whatever awful
horror overcame her in the night, whatever danger, he wouldn't hear, he
wouldn't know, he would still lie there content, content....

'How _good_ you are!' she said to Wemyss, her red eyes filling. 'What
would I have done without you?'

'But what would I have done without _you_?' he answered; and they stared
at each other, astonished at the nature of the bond between them, at its
closeness, at the way it seemed almost miraculously to have been
arranged that they should meet on the crest of despair and save each
other.

Till long after the stars were out they sat together on the edge of the
cliff, Wemyss smoking while he talked, in a voice subdued by the night
and the silence and the occasion, of his life and of the regular healthy
calm with which it had proceeded till a week ago. Why this calm should
have been interrupted, and so cruelly, he couldn't imagine. It wasn't as
if he had deserved it. He didn't know that a man could ever be justified
in saying he had done good, but he, Wemyss, could at least fairly say
that he hadn't done any one any harm.

'Oh, but you have done good,' said Lucy, her voice, too, dropped into
more than ordinary gentleness by the night, the silence, and the
occasion; besides which it vibrated with feeling, it was lovely with
seriousness, with simple conviction. 'Always, always I know that you've
been doing good,' she said, 'being kind. I can't imagine you anything
else but a help to people and a comfort.'

And Wemyss said, Well, he had done his best and tried, and no man could
say more, but judging from what--well, what people had said to him, it
hadn't been much of a success sometimes, and often and often he had been
hurt, deeply hurt, by being misunderstood.

And Lucy said, How was it possible to misunderstand him, to
misunderstand any one so transparently good, so evidently kind?

And Wemyss said, Yes, one would think he was easy enough to understand;
he was a very natural, simple sort of person, who had only all his life
asked for peace and quiet. It wasn't much to ask. Vera----

'Who is Vera?' asked Lucy.

'My wife.'

'Ah, don't,' said Lucy earnestly, taking his hand very gently in hers.
'Don't talk of that to-night please don't let yourself think of it. If I
could only, only find the words that would comfort you----'

And Wemyss said that she didn't need words, that just her being there,
being with him, letting him help her, and her not having been mixed up
with anything before in his life, was enough.

'Aren't we like two children,' he said, his voice, like hers, deepened
by feeling, 'two scared, unhappy children, clinging to each other alone
in the dark.'

So they talked on in subdued voices as people do who are in some holy
place, sitting close together, looking out at the starlit sea, darkness
and coolness gathering round them, and the grass smelling sweetly after
the hot day, and the little waves, such a long way down, lapping lazily
along the shingle, till Wemyss said it must be long past bedtime, and
she, poor girl, must badly need rest.

'How old are you?' he asked suddenly, turning to her and scrutinising
the delicate faint outline of her face against the night.

'Twenty-two,' said Lucy.

'You might just as easily be twelve,' he said, 'except for the sorts of
things you say.'

'It's my hair,' said Lucy. 'My father liked--he liked----'

'Don't,' said Wemyss, in his turn taking her hand. 'Don't cry again.
Don't cry any more to-night. Come--we'll go in. It's time you were in
bed.'

And he helped her up, and when they got into the light of the hall he
saw that she had, this time, successfully strangled her tears.

'Good-night,' she said, when he had lit her candle for her, 'good-night,
and--God bless you.'

'God bless _you_' said Wemyss solemnly, holding her hand in his great
warm grip.

'He has,' said Lucy. 'Indeed He has already, in sending me you.' And she
smiled up at him.

For the first time since he had known her--and he too had the feeling
that he had known her ever since he could remember--he saw her smile,
and the difference it made to her marred, stained face surprised him.

'Do that again,' he said, staring at her, still holding her hand.

'Do what?' asked Lucy.

'Smile,' said Wemyss.

Then she laughed; but the sound of it in the silent, brooding house was
shocking.

'_Oh_,' she gasped, stopping short, hanging her head appalled by what it
had sounded like.

'Remember you're to go to sleep and not think of anything,' Wemyss
ordered as she went slowly upstairs.

And she did fall asleep at once, exhausted but protected, like some
desolate baby that had cried itself sick and now had found its mother.



IV


All this, however, came to an end next day when towards evening Miss
Entwhistle, Lucy's aunt, arrived.

Wemyss retired to his hotel again and did not reappear till next
morning, giving Lucy time to explain him; but either the aunt was
inattentive, as she well might be under the circumstances in which she
found herself so suddenly, so lamentably placed, or Lucy's explanations
were vague, for Miss Entwhistle took Wemyss for a friend of her dear
Jim's, one of her dear, dear brother's many friends, and accepted his
services as natural and himself with emotion, warmth, and reminiscences.

Wemyss immediately became her rock as well as Lucy's, and she in her
turn clung to him. Where he had been clung to by one he was now clung to
by two, which put an end to talk alone with Lucy. He did not see Lucy
alone again once before the funeral, but at least, owing to Miss
Entwhistle's inability to do without him, he didn't have to spend any
more solitary hours. Except breakfast, he had all his meals up in the
little house on the cliff, and in the evenings smoked his pipe under the
mulberry tree till bedtime sent him away, while Miss Entwhistle in the
darkness gently and solemnly reminisced, and Lucy sat silent, as close
to him as she could get.

The funeral was hurried on by the doctor's advice, but even so the short
notice and the long distance did not prevent James Entwhistle's friends
from coming to it. The small church down in the cove was packed; the
small hotel bulged with concerned, grave-faced people. Wemyss, who had
done everything and been everything, disappeared in this crowd. Nobody
noticed him. None of James Entwhistle's friends happened--luckily, he
felt, with last week's newspapers still fresh in the public mind--to be
his. For twenty-four hours he was swept entirely away from Lucy by this
surge of mourners, and at the service in the church could only catch a
distant glimpse, from his seat by the door, of her bowed head in the
front pew.

He felt very lonely again. He wouldn't have stayed in the church a
minute, for he objected with a healthy impatience to the ceremonies of
death, if it hadn't been that he regarded himself as the stage-manager,
so to speak, of these particular ceremonies, and that it was in a
peculiarly intimate sense his funeral. He took a pride in it.
Considering the shortness of the time it really was a remarkable
achievement, the way he had done it, the smooth way the whole thing was
going. But to-morrow,--what would happen to-morrow, when all these
people had gone away again? Would they take Lucy and the aunt with them?
Would the house up there be shut, and he, Wemyss, left alone again with
his bitter, miserable recollections? He wouldn't, of course, stay on in
that place if Lucy were to go, but wherever he went there would be
emptiness without her, without her gratefulness, and gentleness, and
clinging. Comforting and being comforted,--that is what he and she had
been doing to each other for four days, and he couldn't but believe she
would feel the same emptiness without him that he knew he was going to
feel without her.

In the dark under the mulberry tree, while her aunt talked softly and
sadly of the past, Wemyss had sometimes laid his hand on Lucy's, and she
had never taken hers away. They had sat there, content and comforted to
be hand in hand. She had the trust in him, he felt, of a child; the
confidence, and the knowledge that she was safe. He was proud and
touched to know it, and it warmed him through and through to see how her
face lit up whenever he appeared. Vera's face hadn't done that. Vera had
never understood him, not with fifteen years to do it in, as this girl
had in half a day. And the way Vera had died,--it was no use mincing
matters when it came to one's own thoughts, and it had been all of a
piece with her life: the disregard for others and of anything said to
her for her own good, the determination to do what suited her, to lean
out of dangerous windows if she wished to, for instance, not to take the
least trouble, the least thought.... Imagine bringing such horror on
him, such unforgettable horror, besides worries and unhappiness without
end, by deliberately disregarding his warnings, his orders indeed,
about that window. Wemyss did feel that if one looked at the thing
dispassionately it would be difficult to find indifference to the wishes
and feelings of others going further.

Sitting in the church during the funeral service, his arms folded on his
chest and his mouth grim with these thoughts, he suddenly caught sight
of Lucy's face. The priest was coming down the aisle in front of the
coffin on the way out to the grave, and Lucy and her aunt were following
first behind it.

_Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full
of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it
were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay...._

The priest's sad, disillusioned voice recited the beautiful words as he
walked, the afternoon sun from the west window and the open west door
pouring on his face and on the faces of the procession that seemed all
black and white,--black clothes, white faces.

The whitest face was Lucy's, and when Wemyss saw the look on it his
mouth relaxed and his heart went soft within him, and he came
impulsively out of the shadow and joined her, boldly walking on her
other side at the head of the procession, and standing beside her at the
grave; and at the awful moment when the first earth was dropped on to
the coffin he drew her hand, before everybody, through his arm and held
it there tight.

Nobody was surprised at his standing there with her like that. It was
taken quite for granted. He was evidently a relation of poor Jim's. Nor
was anybody surprised when Wemyss, not letting her go again, took her
home up the cliff, her arm in his just as though he were the chief
mourner, the aunt following with some one else.

He didn't speak to her or disturb her with any claims on her attention,
partly because the path was very steep and he wasn't used to cliffs, but
also because of his feeling that he and she, isolated together by their
sorrows, understood without any words. And when they reached the house,
the first to reach it from the church just as if, he couldn't help
thinking, they were coming back from their wedding, he told her in his
firmest voice to go straight up to her room and lie down, and she obeyed
with the sweet obedience of perfect trust.

'Who is that?' asked the man who was helping Miss Entwhistle up the
cliff.

'Oh, a _very_ old friend of darling Jim's,' she sobbed,--she had been
sobbing without stopping from the first words of the burial service, and
was quite unable to leave off. 'Mr.--Mr.--We--We--Wemyss----'

'Wemyss? I don't remember coming across him with Jim.'

'Oh, one of his--his _oldest_--f--fr--friends,' sobbed poor Miss
Entwhistle, got completely out of control.

Wemyss, continuing in his rôle of chief mourner, was the only person who
was asked to spend the evening up at the bereaved house.

'I don't wonder,' said Miss Entwhistle to him at dinner, still with
tears in her voice, 'at my dear brother's devotion to you. You have been
the greatest help, the greatest comfort----'

And neither Wemyss nor Lucy felt equal to explanation.

What did it matter? Lucy, fatigued by emotions, her mind bruised by the
violent demands that had been made on it the last four days, sat
drooping at the table, and merely thought that if her father had known
Wemyss it would certainly have been true that he was devoted to him. He
hadn't known him; he had missed him by--yes, by just three hours; and
this wonderful friend of hers was the very first good thing that she and
her father hadn't shared. And Wemyss's attitude was simply that if
people insist on jumping at conclusions, why, let them. He couldn't
anyhow begin to expound himself in the middle of a meal, with a
parlourmaid handing dishes round and listening.

But there was an awkward little moment when Miss Entwhistle tearfully
wondered--she was eating blanc-mange, the last of a series of cold and
pallid dishes with which the imaginative cook, a woman of Celtic origin,
had expressed her respectful appreciation of the occasion--whether when
the will was read it wouldn't be found that Jim had appointed Mr. Wemyss
poor Lucy's guardian.

'I am--dear me, how very hard it is to remember to say I was--my dear
brother's only relative. We belong--belonged--to an exiguous family, and
naturally I'm no longer as young as I was. There is only--was only--a
year between Jim and me, and at any moment I may be----'

Here Miss Entwhistle was interrupted by a sob, and had to put down her
spoon.

'--taken,' she finished after a moment, during which the other two sat
silent.

'When this happens,' she went on presently, a little recovered, 'poor
Lucy will be without any one, unless Jim thought of this and has
appointed a guardian. You, Mr. Wemyss, I hope and expect.'

Neither Lucy nor Wemyss spoke. There was the parlourmaid hovering, and
one couldn't anyhow go into explanations now which ought to have been
made four days ago.

A dead-white cheese was handed round,--something local probably, for it
wasn't any form of cheese with which Wemyss was acquainted, and the meal
ended with cups of intensely black cold coffee. And all these carefully
thought-out expressions of the cook's sympathy were lost on the three,
who noticed nothing; certainly they noticed nothing in the way the cook
had intended. Wemyss was privately a little put out by the coffee being
cold. He had eaten all the other clammy things patiently, but a man
likes his after-dinner coffee hot, and it was new in his experience to
have it served cold. He did notice this, and was surprised that neither
of his companions appeared to. But there,--women were notoriously
insensitive to food; on this point the best of them were unintelligent,
and the worst of them were impossible. Vera had been awful about it; he
had had to do all the ordering of the meals himself at last, and also
the engaging of the cooks.

He got up from the table to open the door for the ladies feeling
inwardly chilled, feeling, as he put it to himself, slabby inside; and,
left alone with a dish of black plums and some sinister-looking wine in
a decanter, which he avoided because when he took hold of it ice
clinked, he rang the bell as unobtrusively as he could and asked the
parlourmaid in a subdued voice, the French window to the garden being
open and in the garden being Lucy and her aunt, whether there were such
a thing in the house as a whisky and soda.

The parlourmaid, who was a nice-looking girl and much more at home, as
she herself was the first to admit, with gentlemen than with ladies,
brought it him, and inquired how he had liked the dinner.

'Not at all,' said Wemyss, whose mind on that point was clear.

'No sir,' said the parlourmaid, nodding sympathetically. 'No sir.'

She then explained in a discreet whisper, also with one eye on the open
window, how the dinner hadn't been an ordinary dinner and it wasn't
expected that it should be enjoyed, but it was the cook's tribute to her
late master's burial day,--a master they had only known a week, sad to
say, but to whom they had both taken a great fancy, he being so
pleasant-spoken and all for giving no trouble.

Wemyss listened, sipping the comforting drink and smoking a cigar.

Very different, said the parlourmaid, who seemed glad to talk, would the
dinner have been if the cook hadn't liked the poor gentleman. Why, in
one place where she and the cook were together, and the lady was taken
just as the cook would have given notice if she hadn't been because she
was such a very dishonest and unpunctual lady, besides not knowing her
place--no lady, of course, and never was--when she was taken, not sudden
like this poor gentleman but bit by bit, on the day of her funeral the
cook sent up a dinner you'd never think of,--she was like that, all
fancy. Lucky it was that the family didn't read between the lines, for
it began with fried soles----

The parlourmaid paused, her eye anxiously on the window. Wemyss sat
staring at her.

'Did you say fried soles?' he asked, staring at her.

'Yes sir. Fried soles. I didn't see anything in that either at first.
It's how you spell it makes the difference, Cook said. And the next
course was'--her voice dropped almost to inaudibleness--'devilled
bones.'

Wemyss hadn't so much as smiled for nearly a fortnight, and now to his
horror, for what could it possibly sound like to the two mourners on the
lawn, he gave a sudden dreadful roar of laughter. He could hear it
sounding hideous himself.

The noise he made horrified the parlourmaid as much as it did him. She
flew to the window and shut it. Wemyss, in his effort to strangle the
horrid thing, choked and coughed, his table-napkin up to his face, his
body contorted. He was very red, and the parlourmaid watched him in
terror. He had seemed at first to be laughing, though what Uncle Wemyss
(thus did he figure in the conversations of the kitchen) could see to
laugh at in the cook's way of getting her own back, the parlourmaid,
whose flesh had crept when she first heard the story, couldn't
understand; but presently she feared he wasn't laughing at all but was
being, in some very robust way, ill. Dread seized her, deaths being on
her mind, lest perhaps here in the chair, so convulsively struggling
behind a table-napkin, were the beginnings of yet another corpse. Having
flown to shut the window she now flew to open it, and ran out
panic-stricken into the garden to fetch the ladies.

This cured Wemyss. He got up quickly, leaving his half-smoked cigar and
his half-drunk whisky, and followed her out just in time to meet Lucy
and her aunt hurrying across the lawn towards the dining-room window.

'I choked,' he said, wiping his eyes, which indeed were very wet.

'Choked?' repeated Miss Entwhistle anxiously. 'We heard a most strange
noise----'

'That was me choking,' said Wemyss. 'It's all right--it's nothing at
all,' he added to Lucy, who was looking at him with a face of extreme
concern.

But he felt now that he had had about as much of the death and funeral
atmosphere as he could stand. Reaction had set in, and his reactions
were strong. He wanted to get away from woe, to be with normal, cheerful
people again, to have done with conditions in which a laugh was the most
improper of sounds. Here he was, being held down by the head, he felt,
in a black swamp,--first that ghastly business of Vera's, and now this
woebegone family.

Sudden and violent was Wemyss's reaction, let loose by the parlourmaid's
story. Miss Entwhistle's swollen eyes annoyed him. Even Lucy's pathetic
face made him impatient. It was against nature, all this. It shouldn't
be allowed to go on, it oughtn't to be encouraged. Heaven alone knew how
much he had suffered, how much more he had suffered than the Entwhistles
with their perfectly normal sorrow, and if he could feel it was high
time now to think of other things surely the Entwhistles could. He was
tired of funerals. He had carried this one through really brilliantly
from start to finish, but now it was over and done with, and he wished
to get back to naturalness. Death seemed to him highly unnatural. The
mere fact that it only happened once to everybody showed how exceptional
it was, thought Wemyss, thoroughly disgusted with it. Why couldn't he
and the Entwhistles go off somewhere to-morrow, away from this place
altogether, go abroad for a bit, to somewhere cheerful, where nobody
knew them and nobody would expect them to go about with long faces all
day? Ostend, for instance? His mood of sympathy and gentleness had
for the moment quite gone. He was indignant that there should be
circumstances under which a man felt as guilty over a laugh as over a
crime. A natural person like himself looked at things wholesomely. It
was healthy and proper to forget horrors, to dismiss them from one's
mind. If convention, that offspring of cruelty and hypocrisy, insisted
that one's misfortunes should be well rubbed in, that one should be
forced to smart under them, and that the more one was seen to wince the
more one was regarded as behaving creditably,--if convention insisted
on this, and it did insist, as Wemyss had been experiencing himself
since Vera's accident, why then it ought to be defied. He had found he
couldn't defy it by himself, and came away solitary and wretched in
accordance with what it expected, but he felt quite different now that
he had Lucy and her aunt as trusting friends who looked up to him, who
had no doubts of him and no criticisms. Health of mind had come back to
him,--his own natural wholesomeness, which had never deserted him in his
life till this shocking business of Vera's.

'I'd like to have some sensible talk with you,' he said, looking down at
the two small black figures and solemn tired faces that were growing dim
and wraith-like in the failing light of the garden.

'With me or with Lucy?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

By this time they both hung on his possible wishes, and watched him with
the devout attentiveness of a pair of dogs.

'With you and with Lucy,' said Wemyss, smiling at the upturned faces. He
felt very conscious of being the male, of being in command.

It was the first time he had called her Lucy. To Miss Entwhistle it
seemed a matter of course, but Lucy herself flushed with pleasure, and
again had the feeling of being taken care of and safe. Sad as she was at
the end of that sad day, she still was able to notice how nice her very
ordinary name sounded in this kind man's voice. She wondered what his
own name was, and hoped it was something worthy of him,--not Albert, for
instance.

'Shall we go into the drawing-room?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

'Why not to the mulberry tree?' said Wemyss, who naturally wished to
hold Lucy's little hand if possible, and could only do that in the dark.

So they sat there as they had sat other nights, Wemyss in the middle,
and Lucy's hand, when it got dark enough, held close and comfortingly in
his.

'This little girl,' he began, 'must get the roses back into her cheeks.'

'Indeed, indeed she must,' agreed Miss Entwhistle, a catch in her voice
at the mere reminder of the absence of Lucy's roses, and consequently of
what had driven them away.

'How do you propose to set about it?' asked Wemyss.

'Time,' gulped Miss Entwhistle.

'Time?'

'And patience. We must wait we must both wait p-patiently till time has
s-softened----'

She hastily pulled out her handkerchief.

'No, no,' said Wemyss, 'I don't at all agree. It isn't natural, it isn't
reasonable to prolong sorrow. You'll forgive plain words, Miss
Entwhistle, but I don't know any others, and I say it isn't right to
wallow--yes, wallow--in sorrow. Far from being patient one should be
impatient. One shouldn't wait resignedly for time to help one, one
should up and take time by the forelock. In cases of this kind, and
believe me I know what I'm talking about'--it was here that his hand,
the one on the further side from Miss Entwhistle, descended gently on
Lucy's, and she made a little movement closer up to him--'it is due to
oneself to refuse to be knocked out. Courage, spirit, is what one must
aim at,--setting an example.'

Ah, how wonderful he was, thought Lucy; so big, so brave, so simple, and
so tragically recently himself the victim of the most awful of
catastrophes. There was something burly about his very talk. Her darling
father and his friends had talked quite differently. Their talk used to
seem as if it ran about the room like liquid fire, it was so quick and
shining; often it was quite beyond her till her father afterwards, when
she asked him, explained it, put it more simply for her, eager as he
always was that she should share and understand. She could understand
every word of Wemyss's. When he spoke she hadn't to strain, to listen
with all her might; she hardly had to think at all. She found this
immensely reposeful in her present state.

'Yes,' murmured Miss Entwhistle into her handkerchief, 'yes--you're
quite right, Mr. Wemyss--one ought--it would be more--more heroic. But
then if one--if one has loved some one very tenderly--as I did my dear
brother--and Lucy her most precious father----'

She broke off and wiped her eyes.

'Perhaps,' she finished, 'you haven't ever loved anybody very--very
particularly and lost them.'

'Oh,' breathed Lucy at that, and moved still closer to him.

Wemyss was deeply injured. Why should Miss Entwhistle suppose he had
never particularly loved anybody? He seemed, on looking back, to have
loved a great deal. Certainly he had loved Vera with the utmost devotion
till she herself wore it down. He indignantly asked himself what this
maiden lady could know of love.

But there was Lucy's little hand, so clinging, so understanding,
nestling in his. It soothed him.

There was a pause. Then he said, very gravely, 'My wife died only a
fortnight ago.'

Miss Entwhistle was crushed. 'Ah,' she cried, 'but you must forgive
me----'



V


Nevertheless he was not able to persuade her to join him, with Lucy, in
a trip abroad. She was tirelessly concerned to do and say everything she
could that showed her deep sympathy with him in his loss--he had told
her nothing beyond the bare fact, and she was not one to read about
inquests--and her deep sense of obligation to him that he, labouring
under so great a burden of sorrow of his own, should have helped them
with such devotion and unselfishness in theirs; but she wouldn't go
abroad. She was going, she said, to her little house in London with
Lucy.

'What, in August?' exclaimed Wemyss.

Yes, they would be quiet there, and indeed they were both worn out and
only wished for solitude.

'Then why not stay here?' asked Wemyss, who now considered Lucy's aunt
selfish. 'This is solitary enough, in all conscience.'

No, they neither of them felt they could bear to stay in that house.
Lucy must go to the place least connected in her mind with her father.
Indeed, indeed it was best. She did so understand and appreciate Mr.
Wemyss's wonderful and unselfish motives in suggesting the continent,
but she and Lucy were in that state when the idea of an hotel and
waiters and a band was simply impossible to them, and all they wished
was to creep into the quiet and privacy of their own nest,--'Like
wounded birds,' said poor Miss Entwhistle, looking up at him with much
the piteous expression of a dog lifting an injured paw.

'It's very bad for Lucy to be encouraged to think she's a wounded bird,'
said Wemyss, controlling his disappointment as best he could.

'You must come and see us in London and help us to feel heroic,' said
Miss Entwhistle, with a watery smile.

'But I can come and see you much better and easier if you're here,'
persisted Wemyss.

Miss Entwhistle, however, though watery, was determined. She refused to
stay where she so conveniently was, and Wemyss now considered Lucy's
aunt obstinate as well as selfish. Also he thought her very ungrateful.
She had made use of him, and now was going to leave him, without
apparently giving him a thought, in the lurch.

He was having a good deal of Miss Entwhistle, because during the two
days that came after the funeral Lucy was practically invisible, engaged
in collecting and packing her father's belongings. Wemyss hung about the
garden, not knowing when these activities mightn't suddenly cease and
not wishing to miss her if she did come out, and Miss Entwhistle, who
couldn't help Lucy in this--no one could help her in the heart-breaking
work--naturally joined him.

He found these two days long. Miss Entwhistle felt there was a great
bond between herself and him, and Wemyss felt there wasn't. When she
said there was he had difficulty in not contradicting her. Not only,
Miss Entwhistle felt, and also explained, was there the bond of their
dear Jim, whom both she and Mr. Wemyss had so much loved, but there was
this communion of sorrow,--the loss of his wife, the loss of her
brother, within the same fortnight.

Wemyss shut his mouth tight at this and said nothing.

How natural for her, feeling so sorry for him, feeling so grateful to
him, when from a window during those two days she beheld him sitting
solitary beneath the mulberry tree, to go down and sit there with him;
how natural that, when he got up, made restless, she supposed, by
his memories, and began to pace the lawn, she should get up and
sympathetically pace it too. She could not let this kind, tender-hearted
man--he must be that, or Jim wouldn't have been fond of him, besides she
had seen it for herself in the way he had helped her and Lucy--she could
not let him be alone with his sad thoughts. And he had a double burden
of sad thoughts, a double loss to bear, for he had lost her dear brother
as well as his poor wife.

All Entwhistles were compassionate, and as she and Wemyss sat together
or together paced, she kept up a flow of gentle loving-kindness.
Wemyss smoked his pipe in practically unbroken silence. This was his way
when he was holding on to himself. Miss Entwhistle of course didn't
know he was holding on to himself, and taking his silence for the
inarticulateness of deep unhappiness was so much touched that she would
have done anything for him, anything that might bring this poor, kind,
suffering fellow-creature comfort--except go to Ostend. From that
dreadful suggestion she continued to shudder away; nor, though he tried
again, even after all arrangements for leaving Cornwall had been made,
would she be persuaded to stay where she was.

Therefore Wemyss was forced to conclude that she was obstinate as well
as selfish; and if it hadn't been for the brief moments at meals when
Lucy appeared, and through her unhappiness--what she was doing was
obviously depressing her very much--smiled faintly at him and always
went and sat as near him as she could, he would have found these two
days intolerable.

How atrocious, he thought, while he smoked in silence and held on to
himself, that Lucy should be taken away from him by a mere maiden lady,
an aunt, an unmarried aunt,--weakest and most negligible, surely, of all
relatives. How atrocious that such a person should have any right to
come between him and Lucy, to say she wouldn't do this, that, or the
other that Wemyss proposed, and thus possess the power to make him
unhappy. Miss Entwhistle was so little that he could have brushed her
aside with the back of one hand; yet here again the strong monster
public opinion stepped in and forced him to acquiesce in any plan she
chose to make for Lucy, however desolate it left him, merely because she
stood to her in the anæmic relationship of aunt.

During two mortal days, as he waited about in that garden so grievously
infested by Miss Entwhistle, sounds of boxes being moved and drawers
being opened and shut came through the windows, but except at meals
there was no Lucy. He could have borne it if he hadn't known they were
the very last days he would be with her, but as things were it seemed
cruel that he should be left like that to be miserable. Why should he be
left like that to be miserable, just because of a lot of clothes and
papers? he asked himself; and he felt he was getting thoroughly tired of
Jim.

'Haven't you done yet?' he said at tea on the second afternoon of this
sorting out and packing, when Lucy got up to go indoors again, leaving
him with Miss Entwhistle, even before he had finished his second cup of
tea.

'You've no idea what a lot there is,' she said, her voice sounding worn
out; and she lingered a moment, her hand on the back of her aunt's
chair. 'Father brought all his notes with him, and heaps and heaps of
letters from people he was consulting, and I'm trying to get them
straight--get them as he would have wished----'

Miss Entwhistle put up her hand and stroked Lucy's arm.

'If you weren't in this hurry to go away you'd have had more time and
done it comfortably,' said Wemyss.

'Oh, but I don't want more time,' said Lucy quickly.

'Lucy means she couldn't bear it drawn out,' said Miss Entwhistle,
leaning her thin cheek against Lucy's sleeve. 'These things--they tear
one's heart. And nobody can help her. She has to go through with it
alone.' And she drew Lucy's face down to hers and held it there a
moment, gently stroking it, the tears brimming up again in the eyes of
both.

Always tears, thought Wemyss. Yes, and there always would be tears as
long as that aunt had hold of Lucy. She was the arch-wallower, he told
himself, filling his pipe in silence after Lucy had gone in.

He got up and went out at the gate and crossed the road and stood
staring at the evening sea. Should he hear steps coming after him and
Miss Entwhistle were to follow him even beyond the garden, he would
proceed without looking round down to the cove and to the inn, where she
must needs leave him alone. He had had enough. That Miss Entwhistle
should explain to him what Lucy meant, he considered to be the last
straw of her behaviour. Barging in, he said indignantly to himself;
barging in when nobody had asked her opinion or explanation of anything.
And she had stroked Lucy's face as though Lucy and her face and
everything about her belonged to her, merely because she happened to be
her aunt. Fancy explaining to him what Lucy really meant, taking upon
herself the functions of interpreter, of go-between, when for a whole
day and a half before she appeared on the scene--and she had only
appeared on it at all thanks to his telegram--Lucy and he had been in
the closest fellowship, the closest communion....

Well, things couldn't go on like this. He was not the man to be
dominated by a relative. If he had lived in those sensible ancient days
when people behaved wholesomely, he would have flung Lucy over his
shoulder and walked off with her to Ostend or Paris and laughed at such
insects as aunts. He couldn't do that unfortunately, though where the
harm would be in two mourners like himself and Lucy going together in
search of relief he must say he was unable to see. Why should they be
condemned to search for relief separately? Their sorrows, surely, would
be their chaperone, especially his sorrow. Nobody would object to Lucy's
nursing him, supposing he were dangerously ill; why should she not be
equally beyond the reach of tongues if she nursed the bitter wounds of
his spirit?

He heard steps coming down the garden path to the gate. There, he
thought, was the aunt again, searching for him, and he stood squarely
and firmly with his back to the road, smoking his pipe and staring at
the sea. If he heard the gate open and she dared to come through it he
would instantly walk away. In the garden he had to endure being joined
by her, because there he was in the position of guest; but let her try
to join him on the King's highway!

Nobody opened the gate, however, and, as he heard no retreating
footsteps either, after a minute he began to want to look round. He
struggled against this wish, because the moment Miss Entwhistle caught
his eye she would come out to him, he felt sure. But Wemyss was not much
good at struggling against his wishes,--he usually met with defeat; and
after briefly doing so on this occasion he did look round. And what a
good thing he did, for it was Lucy.

There she was, leaning on the gate just as she had been that first
morning, but this time her eyes instead of being wide and blank were
watching him with a deep and touching interest.

He got across the road in one stride. 'Lucy!' he exclaimed. 'You? Why
didn't you call me? We've wasted half an hour----'

'About two minutes,' she said, smiling up at him as he, on the other
side of the gate, folded both her hands in his just as he had done that
first morning; and the relief it was to Wemyss to see her again alone,
to see that smile of trust and--surely--content in getting back to him!

Then her face went grave again. 'I've finished father's things now,' she
said, 'and so I came to look for you.'

'Lucy, how can you leave me,' was Wemyss's answer to that, his voice
vibrating, 'how can you go away from me to-morrow and hand me over again
to the torments--yes, torments, I was in before?'

'But I have to go,' she said, distressed. 'And you mustn't say that. You
mustn't let yourself be like that again. You won't be, I know--you're so
brave and strong.'

'Not without you. I'm nothing without you,' said Wemyss; and his eyes,
as he searched hers, were full of tears.

At this Lucy flushed, and then, staring at him, her face went slowly
white. These words of his, the way he said them, reminded her--oh no, it
wasn't possible; he and she stood in a relationship to each other like
none, she was sure, that had ever yet been. It was an intimacy arrived
at at a bound, with no preliminary steps. It was a holy thing, based on
mutual grief, protected from everything ordinary by the great wings of
Death. He was her wonderful friend, big in his simplicity, all care for
her and goodness, a very rock of refuge and shelter in the wilderness
she had been flung into when he found her. And that he, bleeding as he
was himself from the lacerations of the violent rending asunder from
his wife to whom he had been, as he had told her, devoted, that he
should--oh no, it wasn't possible; and she hung her head, shocked at her
thoughts. For the way he had said those words, and the words themselves
had reminded her--no, she could hardly bear to think it, but they _had_
reminded her of the last time she had been proposed to. The man--he
was a young man; she had never been proposed to by any one even
approximately Wemyss's age--had said almost exactly that: Without you I
am nothing. And just in that same deep, vibrating voice.

How dreadful thoughts could be, Lucy said to herself, overcome that such
a one at such a moment should thrust itself into her mind. Hateful of
her, hateful....

She hung her head in shame; and Wemyss, looking down at the little
bobbed head with its bright, thick young hair bent over their folded
hands as though it were saying its prayers,--Wemyss, not having his pipe
in his mouth to protect him and help him to hold on to himself, for he
had hastily stuffed it in his pocket, all alight as it was, when he saw
her at the gate, and there at that moment it was burning holes,--Wemyss,
after a brief struggle with his wishes, in which as usual he was
defeated, stooped and began to kiss Lucy's hair. And having begun, he
continued.

She was horrified. At the first kiss she started as if she had been hit,
and then, clinging to the gate, she stood without moving, without being
able to think or lift her head, in the same attitude bowed over his and
her own hands, while this astonishing thing was being done to her hair.
Death all round them, death pervading every corner of their lives, death
in its blackest shape brooding over him, and--kisses. Her mind, if
anything so gentle could be said to be in anything that sounds so loud,
was in an uproar. She had had the complete, guileless trust in him of a
child for a tender and sympathetic friend,--a friend, not a father,
though he was old enough to be her father, because in a father, however
much hidden by sweet comradeship as it had been in hers, there always at
the back of everything was, after all, authority. And it had been even
more than the trust of a child in its friend: it had been the trust of a
child in a fellow-child hit by the same punishment,--a simple
fellowship, a wordless understanding.

She hung on to the gate while her thoughts flew about in confusion
within her. These kisses--and his wife just dead--and dead so
terribly--how long would she have to stand there with this going on--she
couldn't lift up her head, for then she felt it would only get
worse--she couldn't turn and run into the house, because he was holding
her hands. He oughtn't to have--oh, he oughtn't to have--it wasn't
fair....

Then--what was he saying? She heard him say, in an absolutely broken
voice, laying his head on hers, 'We two poor things--we two poor
things'--and then he said and did nothing more, but kept his head like
that, and presently, thick though her hair was, through it came wetness.

At that Lucy's thoughts suddenly stopped flying about and were quite
still. Her heart went to wax within her, melted again into pity, into a
great flood of pitiful understanding. The dreadfulness of lonely
grief.... Was there anything in the world so blackly desolate as to be
left alone in grief? This poor broken fellow-creature--and she herself,
so lost, so lost in loneliness--they were two half-drowned things,
clinging together in a shipwreck--how could she let him go, leave him to
himself--how could she be let go, left to herself....

'Lucy,' he said, 'look at me----'

She lifted her head. He loosed her hands, and put his arms round her
shoulders.

'Look at me,' he said; for though she had lifted her head she hadn't
lifted her eyes.

She looked at him. Tears were on his face. When she saw them her mouth
began to quiver and twitch. She couldn't bear that.

'Lucy----' he said again.

She shut her eyes. 'Yes'--she breathed, 'yes.' And with one hand she
felt along up his coat till she reached his face, and shakingly tried to
brush away its tears.



VI


After that, for the moment anyhow, it was all over with Lucy. She was
engulfed. Wemyss kissed her shut eyes, he kissed her parted lips, he
kissed her dear, delightful bobbed hair. His tears dried up; or rather,
wiped away by her little blind, shaking hand, there were no more of
them. Death for Wemyss was indeed at that moment swallowed up in
victory. Instantly he passed from one mood to the other, and when she
finally did open her eyes at his orders and look at him, she saw bending
over her a face she hardly recognised, for she had not yet seen him
happy. Happy! How could he be happy, as happy as that all in a moment?
She stared at him, and even through her confusion, her bewilderment, was
frankly amazed.

Then the thought crept into her mind that it was she who had done this,
it was she who had transformed him, and her stare softened into a gaze
almost of awe, with something of the look in it of a young mother when
she first sees her new-born baby. 'So that is what it is like,' the
young mother whispers to herself in a sort of holy surprise, 'and I have
made it, and it is mine'; and so, gazing at this new, effulgent Wemyss,
did Lucy say to herself with the same feeling of wonder, of awe at her
own handiwork, 'So that is what he is like.'

Wemyss's face was indeed one great beam. He simply at that moment
couldn't remember that he had ever been miserable. He seemed to have his
arms round Love itself; for never did any one look more like the very
embodiment of his idea of love than Lucy then as she gazed up at him, so
tender, so resistless. But there were even more wonderful moments after
dinner in the darkening garden, while Miss Entwhistle was upstairs
packing ready to start by the early train next morning, and they hadn't
got the gate between them, and Lucy of her own accord laid her cheek
against his coat, nestling her head into it as though there indeed she
knew that she was safe.

'My baby--my baby,' Wemyss murmured, in an ecstasy of passionate
protectiveness, in his turn flooded by maternal feeling. 'You shall
never cry again never, never.'

It irked him that their engagement--Lucy demurred at first to the word
engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would
very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her
position at that moment--it irked him that it had to be a secret. He
wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his
pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was
even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word
impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his
wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the
faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends
would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should
approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not
greatly imaginative, could picture. And Lucy, quite overwhelmed, first
by his tears and then by his joy, no longer could judge anything. She no
longer knew whether it were very awful to be love-making in the middle
of death, or whether it were, as Wemyss said, the natural glorious
self-assertiveness of life. She knew nothing any more except that he and
she, shipwrecked, had saved each other, and that for the moment nothing
was required of her, no exertion, nothing at all, except to sit passive
with her head on his breast, while he called her his baby and softly,
wonderfully, kissed her closed eyes. She couldn't think; she needn't
think; oh, she was tired--and this was rest.

But after he had gone that night, and all the next day in the train
without him, and for the first few days in London, misgivings laid hold
of her.

That she should be being made love to, be engaged, as Wemyss insisted,
within a week of her father's death, could not, she thought, be called
anything worse than possibly and at the outside an irrelevance. It did
no harm to her father's dear memory; it in no way encroached on her
adoration of him. He would have been the first to be pleased that
she should have found comfort. But what worried her was that
Everard--Wemyss's Christian name was Everard--should be able to think of
such things as love and more marriage when his wife had just died so
awfully, and he on the very spot, and he the first to rush out and
see....

She found that the moment she was away from him she couldn't get over
this. It went round and round in her head as a thing she was unable, by
herself, to understand. While she was with him he overpowered her into a
torpor, into a shutting of her eyes and her thoughts, into just giving
herself up, after the shocks and agonies of the week, to the blessedness
of a soothed and caressed semi-consciousness; and it was only when his
first letters began to come, such simple, adoring letters, taking the
situation just as it was, just as life and death between them had
offered it, untroubled by questioning, undimmed by doubt, with no
looking backward but with a touching, thankful acceptance of the
present, that she gradually settled down into that placidity which was
at once the relief and the astonishment of her aunt. And his letters
were so easy to understand. They were so restfully empty of the
difficult thoughts and subtle, half-said things her father used to write
and all his friends. His very handwriting was the round, slow
handwriting of a boy. Lucy had loved him before; but now she fell in
love with him, and it was because of his letters.



VII


Miss Entwhistle lived in a slim little house in Eaton Terrace. It was
one of those little London houses where you go in and there's a
dining-room, and you go up and there's a drawing-room, and you go up
again and there's a bedroom and a dressing-room, and you go up yet more
and there's a maid's room and a bathroom, and then that's all. For one
person it was just enough; for two it was difficult. It was so difficult
that Miss Entwhistle had never had any one stay with her before, and the
dressing-room had to be cleared out of all her clothes and toques, which
then had nowhere to go to and became objects that you met at night
hanging over banisters or perched with an odd air of dashingness on the
ends of the bath, before Lucy could go in.

But no Entwhistle ever minded things like that. No trouble seemed to any
of them too great to take for a friend; while as for one's own dear
niece, if only she could have been induced to take the real bedroom and
let her aunt, who knew the dressing-room's ways, sleep there instead,
that aunt--on such liberal principles was this family constructed--would
have been perfectly happy.

Lucy, of course, only smiled at that suggestion, and inserted herself
neatly into the dressing-room, and the first weeks of their mourning,
which Miss Entwhistle had dreaded for them both, proceeded to flow by
with a calm, an unruffledness, that could best be described by the word
placid.

In that small house, unless the inhabitants were accommodating and
adaptable, daily life would be a trial. Miss Entwhistle well knew Lucy
would give no trouble that she could help, but their both being in such
trouble themselves would, at such close quarters, she had been afraid,
inevitably keep their sorrow raw by sheer rubbing against each other.

To her surprise and great relief nothing of the sort happened. There
seemed to be no rawness to rub. Not only Lucy didn't fret--her white
face and heavy eyes of the days in Cornwall had gone--but she was almost
from the first placid. Just on leaving Cornwall, and for a day or two
after, she was a little _bouleversée_, and had a curious kind of
timidity in her manner to her aunt, and crept rather than walked about
the house, but this gradually disappeared; and if Miss Entwhistle hadn't
known her, hadn't known of her terrible loss, she would have said that
here was some one who was quietly happy. It was subdued, but there it
was, as if she had some private source of confidence and warmth. Had she
by any chance got religion? wondered her aunt, who herself had never had
it, and neither had Jim, and neither had any Entwhistles she had ever
heard of. She dismissed that. It was too unlikely for one of their
breed. But even the frequent necessary visits to the house in Bloomsbury
she and her father had lived in so long didn't quite blot out the odd
effect Lucy produced of being somehow inwardly secure. Presently, when
these sad settlings up were done with, and the books and furniture
stored, and the house handed over to the landlord, and she no longer had
to go to it and be among its memories, her face became what it used to
be,--delicately coloured, softly rounded, ready to light up at a word,
at a look.

Miss Entwhistle was puzzled. This serenity of the one who was, after
all, chief mourner, made her feel it would be ridiculous if she outdid
Lucy in grief. If Lucy could pull herself together so marvellously--and
she supposed it must be that, it must be that she was heroically pulling
herself together--she for her part wouldn't be behindhand. Her darling
Jim's memory should be honoured, then, like this: she would bless God
for him, bless God that she had had him, and in a high thankfulness
continue cheerfully on her way.

Such were some of Miss Entwhistle's reflections and conclusions as she
considered Lucy. She seemed to have no thought of the future,--again to
her aunt's surprise and relief, who had been afraid she would very soon
begin to worry about what she was to do next. She never talked of it;
she never apparently thought of it. She seemed to be--yes, that was the
word, decided Miss Entwhistle observing her--resting. But resting on
what? A second time Miss Entwhistle dismissed the idea of religion.
Impossible, she thought, that Jim's girl,--yet it did look very like
religion.

There was, it appeared, enough money left scraped together by Jim for
Lucy in case of his death to produce about two hundred pounds a year.
This wasn't much; but Lucy apparently didn't give it a thought. Probably
she didn't realise what it meant, thought her aunt, because of her life
with her father having been so easy, surrounded by all those necessities
for an invalid which were, in fact, to ordinary people luxuries. No one
had been appointed her guardian. There was no mention of Mr. Wemyss in
the will. It was a very short will, leaving everything to Lucy. This,
as far as it went, was admirable, thought Miss Entwhistle, but
unfortunately there was hardly anything to leave. Except books;
thousands of books, and the old charming furniture of the Bloomsbury
house. Well, Lucy should live with her for as long as she could endure
the dressing-room, and perhaps they might take a house together a little
less tiny, though Miss Entwhistle had lived in the one she was in for so
long that it wouldn't be very easy for her to leave it.

Meanwhile the first weeks of mourning slid by in an increasing serenity,
with London empty and no one to intrude on what became presently
distinctly recognisable as happiness. She and Lucy agreed so perfectly.
And they weren't altogether alone either, for Mr. Wemyss came regularly
twice a week, coming on the same days, and appearing so punctually on
the stroke of five that at last she began to set her clocks by him.

He, too, poor man, seemed to be pulling himself together. He had none of
the air of the recently bereaved, either in his features or his clothes.
Not that he wore coloured ties or anything like that, but he certainly
didn't produce an effect of blackness. His trousers, she observed, were
grey; and not a particularly dark grey either. Well, perhaps it was no
longer the fashion, thought Miss Entwhistle, eyeing these trousers with
some doubt, to be very unhappy. But she couldn't help thinking there
ought to be a band on his left arm to counteract the impression of
light-heartedness in his legs; a crape band, no matter how narrow, or a
band of black anything, not necessarily crape, such as she was sure it
was usual in these circumstances to wear.

However, whatever she felt about his legs she welcomed him with the
utmost cordiality, mindful of his kindness to them down in Cornwall and
of how she had clung to him there as her rock; and she soon got to
remember the way he liked his tea, and had the biggest chair placed
comfortably ready for him--the chairs were neither very big nor numerous
in her spare little drawing-room--and did all she could in the way of
hospitality and pleasant conversation. But the more she saw of him, and
the more she heard of his talk, the more she wondered at Jim.

Mr. Wemyss was most good-natured, and she was sure, and as she knew from
experience, was most kind and thoughtful; but the things he said were so
very unlike the things Jim said, and his way of looking at things was so
very unlike Jim's way. Not that there wasn't room in the world for
everybody, Miss Entwhistle reminded herself, sitting at her tea-table
observing Wemyss, who looked particularly big and prosperous in her
small frugal room, and no doubt one star differed from another in glory;
still, she did wonder at Jim. And if Mr. Wemyss could bear the loss of
his wife to the extent of grey trousers, how was it he couldn't bear
Jim's name so much as mentioned? Whenever the talk got on to Jim--it
couldn't be kept off him in a circle composed of his daughter and his
sister and his friend--she noticed that Mr. Wemyss went silent. She
would have taken this for excess of sensibility and the sign of a deep
capacity for faithful devotion if it hadn't been for those trousers.
Faced by them, it perplexed her.

While Miss Entwhistle was thinking like this and observing Wemyss, who
never observed her at all after a first moment of surprise that she
should look and behave so differently from the liquid lady of the
cottage in Cornwall, that she should sit so straight and move so
briskly, he and Lucy were, though present in the body, absent in love.
Round them was drawn that magic circle through which nobody and nothing
can penetrate, and within it they sat hand in hand and safe. Lucy's
whole heart was his. He only had to come into the room for her to feel
content. There was a naturalness, a bigness about his way of looking at
things that made intricate, tormenting feelings shrink away in his
presence ashamed. Quite apart from her love for him, her gratitude, her
longing that he should go on now being happy and forget his awful
tragedy, he was so very comfortable. She had never met any one so
comfortable to lean on mentally. Bodily, on the few occasions on which
her aunt was out of the room, he was comfortable too; he reminded her of
the very nicest of sofas,--expensive ones, all cushions. But mentally he
was more than comfortable, he was positively luxurious. Such perfect
rest, listening to his talk. No thinking needed. Things according to him
were either so, or so. With her father things had never been either so,
or so; and one had had to frown, and concentrate, and make efforts to
follow and understand his distinctions, his infinitely numerous,
delicate, difficult distinctions. Everard's plain division of everything
into two categories only, snow-white and jet-black, was as reposeful as
the Roman church. She hadn't got to strain or worry, she had only to
surrender. And to what love, to what safety! At night she couldn't go to
bed for thinking of how happy she was. She would sit quite still in the
little dressing-room, her hands in her lap, and a proverb she had read
somewhere running in her head:

     When God shuts the door He opens the window.

Not for a moment, hardly, had she been left alone to suffer. Instantly,
almost, Everard had come into her life and saved her. Lucy had indeed,
as her aunt had twice suspected, got religion, but her religion was
Wemyss. Ah, how she loved him! And every night she slept with his last
letter under her pillow on the side of her heart.

As for Wemyss, if Lucy couldn't get over having got him he couldn't get
over having got Lucy. He hadn't had such happiness as this, of this
quality of tenderness, of goodness, in his life before. What he had felt
for Vera had not at any time, he was sure, even at the beginning, been
like this. While for the last few years--oh, well. Wemyss, when he found
himself thinking of Vera, pulled up short. He declined to think of her
now. She had filled his thoughts enough lately, and how terribly. His
little angel Lucy had healed that wound, and there was no use in
thinking of an old wound; nobody healthy ever did that. He had explained
to Lucy, who at first had been a little morbid, how wrong it is, how
really wicked, besides being intensely stupid, not to get over things.
Life, he had said, is for the living; let the dead have death. The
present is the only real possession a man has, whatever clever people
may say; and the wise man, who is also the natural man of simple healthy
instincts and a proper natural shrinking from death and disease, does
not allow the past, which after all anyhow is done for, to intrude upon,
much less spoil, the present. That is what, he explained, the past will
always do if it can. The only safe way to deal with it is to forget it.

'But I don't want to forget mine,' Lucy had said at that, opening her
eyes, which as usual had been shut, because the commas of Wemyss's talk
with her when they chanced to be alone were his soothing, soporific
kisses dropped gently on her closed eyelids. 'Father----'

'Oh, you may remember yours,' he had answered, smiling tenderly down at
the head lying on his breast. 'It's such a little one. But you'll see
when you're older if your Everard wasn't right.'

To Wemyss in his new happiness it seemed that Vera had belonged to
another life altogether, an elderly, stale life from which, being
healthy-minded, he had managed to unstick himself and to emerge born
again all new and fresh and fitted for the present. She was forty when
she died. She had started life five years younger than he was, but had
quickly caught him up and passed him, and had ended, he felt, by being
considerably his senior. And here was Lucy, only twenty-two anyhow, and
looking like twelve. The contrast never ceased to delight him, to fill
him with pride. And how pretty she was, now that she had left off
crying. He adored her bobbed hair that gave her the appearance of a
child or a very young boy, and he adored the little delicate lines of
her nose and nostrils, and her rather big, kind mouth that so easily
smiled, and her sweet eyes, the colour of Love-in-a-Mist. Not that he
set any store by prettiness, he told himself; all he asked in a woman
was devotion. But her being pretty would make it only the more exciting
when the moment came to show her to his friends, to show his little girl
to those friends who had dared slink away from him after Vera's death,
and say, 'Look here--look at this perfect little thing--_she_ believes
in me all right!'



VIII


London being empty, Wemyss had it all his own way. No one else was there
to cut him out, as his expression was. Lucy had many letters with offers
of every kind of help from her father's friends, but naturally she
needed no help and had no wish to see anybody in her present condition
of secret contentment, and she replied to them with thanks and vague
expressions of hope that later on they might all meet. One young man--he
was the one who often proposed to her--wasn't to be put off like that,
and journeyed all the way from Scotland, so great was his devotion, and
found out from the caretaker of the Bloomsbury house that she was living
with her aunt, and called at Eaton Terrace. But that afternoon Lucy and
Miss Entwhistle were taking the air in a car Wemyss had hired, and at
the very moment the young man was being turned away from the Eaton
Terrace door Lucy was being rowed about the river at Hampton Court--very
slowly, because of how soon Wemyss got hot--and her aunt, leaning on the
stone parapet at the end of the Palace gardens, was observing her. It
was a good thing the young man wasn't observing her too, for it wouldn't
have made him happy.

'What is Mr. Wemyss?' asked Miss Entwhistle unexpectedly that evening,
just as they were going to bed.

Lucy was taken aback. Her aunt hadn't asked a question or said a thing
about him up to then, except general comments on his kindness and
good-nature.

'What is Mr. Wemyss?' she repeated stupidly; for she was not only taken
aback, but also, she discovered, she had no idea. It had never occurred
to her even to wonder what he was, much less to ask. She had been, as it
were, asleep the whole time in a perfect contentment on his breast.

'Yes. What is he besides being a widower?' said Miss Entwhistle. 'We
know he's that, but it is hardly a profession.'

'I--don't think I know,' said Lucy, looking and feeling very stupid.

'Oh well, perhaps he isn't anything,' said her aunt kissing her
good-night. 'Except punctual,' she added, smiling, pausing a moment at
her bedroom door.

And two or three days later, when Wemyss had again hired a car to take
them for an outing to Windsor, while she and Lucy were tidying
themselves for tea in the ladies' room of the hotel she turned from the
looking-glass in the act of pinning back some hair loosened by motoring,
and in spite of having a hairpin in her mouth said, again suddenly,
'What did Mrs. Wemyss die of?'

This unnerved Lucy. If she had stared stupidly at her aunt at the other
question she stared aghast at her at this one.

'What did she die of?' she repeated, flushing.

'Yes. What illness was it?' asked her aunt, continuing to pin.

'It--wasn't an illness,' said Lucy helplessly.

'Not an illness?'

'I--believe it was an accident.'

'An accident?' said Miss Entwhistle, taking the hairpin out of her mouth
and in her turn staring. 'What sort of an accident?'

'I think a rather serious one,' said Lucy, completely unnerved.

How could she bear to tell that dreadful story, the knowledge of which
seemed somehow so intimately to bind her and Everard together with a
sacred, terrible tie?

At that her aunt remarked that an accident resulting in death would
usually be described as serious, and asked what its nature, apart from
its seriousness, had been; and Lucy, driven into a corner, feeling
instinctively that her aunt, who had already once or twice expressed
what she said was her surprised admiration for Mr. Wemyss's heroic way
of bearing his bereavement, might be too admiringly surprised altogether
if she knew how tragically much he really had to bear, and might begin
to inquire into the reasons of this heroism, took refuge in saying what
she now saw she ought to have begun by saying, even though it wasn't
true, that she didn't know.

'Ah,' said her aunt. 'Well--poor man. It's wonderful how he bears
things.' And again in her mind's eye, and with an increased doubt, she
saw the grey trousers.

That day at tea Wemyss, with the simple naturalness Lucy found so
restful, the almost bald way he had of talking frankly about things more
sophisticated people wouldn't have mentioned, began telling them of the
last time he had been at Windsor.

It was the summer before, he said, and he and his wife--at this Miss
Entwhistle became attentive--had motored down one Sunday to lunch in
that very room, and it had been so much crowded, and the crowding had
been so monstrously mismanaged, that positively they had had to go away
without having had lunch at all.

'Positively without having had any lunch at all,' repeated Wemyss,
looking at them with a face full of astonished aggrievement at the mere
recollection.

'Ah,' said Miss Entwhistle, leaning across to him, 'don't let us revive
sad memories.'

Wemyss stared at her. Good heavens, he thought, did she think he was
talking about Vera? Any one with a grain of sense would know he was only
talking about the lunch he hadn't had.

He turned impatiently to Lucy, and addressed his next remark to her. But
in another moment there was her aunt again.

'Mr. Wemyss,' she said, 'I've been dying to ask you----'

Again he was forced to attend. The pure air and rapid motion of the
motoring intended to revive and brace his little love were apparently
reviving and bracing his little love's aunt as well, for lately he had
been unable to avoid noticing a tendency on her part to assert herself.
During his first eight visits to Eaton Terrace--that made four weeks
since his coming back to London and six since the funeral in
Cornwall--he had hardly known she was in the room; except, of course,
that she _was_ in the room, completely hindering his courting. During
those eight visits his first impression of her remained undisturbed in
his mind: she was a wailing creature who had hung round him in Cornwall
in a constant state of tears. Down there she had behaved exactly like
the traditional foolish woman when there is a death about,--no common
sense, no grit, crying if you looked at her, and keeping up a continual
dismal recital of the virtues of the departed. Also she had been
obstinate; and she had, besides, shown unmistakable signs of
selfishness. When he paid his first call in Eaton Terrace he did notice
that she had considerably, indeed completely, dried up, and was
therefore to that extent improved, but she still remained for him just
Lucy's aunt,--somebody who poured out the tea, and who unfortunately
hardly ever went out of the room; a necessary, though luckily a
transitory, evil. But now it was gradually being borne in on him that
she really existed, on her own account, independently. She asserted
herself. Even when she wasn't saying anything--and often she said hardly
a word during an entire outing--she still somehow asserted herself.

And here she was asserting herself very much indeed, and positively
asking him across a tea-table which was undoubtedly for the moment his,
asking him straight out what, if anything, he did in the way of a trade,
profession or occupation.

She was his guest, and he regarded it as less than seemly for a guest to
ask a host what he did. Not that he wouldn't gladly have told her if it
had come from him of his own accord. Surely a man has a right, he
thought, to his own accord. At all times Wemyss disliked being asked
questions. Even the most innocent, ordinary question appeared to him to
be an encroachment on the right he surely had to be let alone.

Lucy's aunt between sips of tea--his tea--pretended, pleasantly it is
true, and clothing what could be nothing but idle curiosity in words
that were not disagreeable, that she was dying to know what he was. She
could see for herself, she said, smiling down at the leg nearest her,
that he wasn't a bishop, she was sure he wasn't either a painter,
musician or writer, but she wouldn't be in the least surprised if he
were to tell her he was an admiral.

Wemyss thought this intelligent of the aunt. He had no objection to
being taken for an admiral; they were an honest, breezy lot.

Placated, he informed her that he was on the Stock Exchange.

'Ah,' nodded Miss Entwhistle, looking wise because on this subject she
so completely wasn't, the Stock Exchange being an institution whose
nature and operations were alien to anything the Entwhistles were
familiar with; 'ah yes. Quite. Bulls and bears. Now I come to look at
it, you have the Stock Exchange eye.'

'Foolish woman,' thought Wemyss, who for some reason didn't like being
told before Lucy that he had the Stock Exchange eye; and he dismissed
her impatiently from his mind and concentrated on his little love,
asking himself while he did so how short he could, with any sort of
propriety, cut this unpleasant time of restricted courting, of never
being able to go anywhere with her unless her tiresome aunt came too.

Nearly two months now since both those deaths; surely Lucy's aunt might
soon be told now of the engagement. It was after this outing that he
began in his letters, and in the few moments he and she were alone, to
urge Lucy to tell her aunt. Nobody else need know, he wrote; it could go
on being kept secret from the world; but the convenience of her aunt's
knowing was so obvious,--think of how she would then keep out of the
way, think of how she would leave them to themselves, anyhow indoors,
anyhow in the house in Eaton Terrace.

Lucy, however, was reluctant. She demurred. She wrote begging him to be
patient. She said that every week that passed would make their
engagement less a thing that need surprise. She said that at present it
would take too much explaining, and she wasn't sure that even at the end
of the explanation her aunt would understand.

Wemyss wrote back brushing this aside. He said her aunt would have to
understand, and if she didn't what did it matter so long as she knew?
The great thing was that she should know. Then, he said, she would
leave them alone together, instead of for ever sticking; and his little
love must see how splendid it would be for him to come and spend happy
hours with her quite alone. What was an aunt after all? he asked. What
could she possibly be, compared to Lucy's own Everard? Besides, he
disliked secrecy, he said. No honest man could stand an atmosphere of
concealment. His little girl must make up her mind to tell her aunt, and
believe that her Everard knew best; or, if she preferred it, he would
tell her himself.

Lucy didn't prefer it, and was beginning to feel worried, because as the
days went on Wemyss grew more and more persistent the more he became
bored by Miss Entwhistle's development of an independent and inquiring
mind, and she hated having to refuse or even to defer doing anything he
asked, when her aunt one morning at breakfast, in the very middle of
apparent complete serene absorption in her bacon, looked up suddenly
over the coffee-pot and said, 'How long had your father known Mr.
Wemyss?'

This settled things. Lucy felt she could bear no more of these shocks. A
clean breast was the only thing left for her.

'Aunt Dot,' she stammered--Miss Entwhistle's Christian name was
Dorothy,--'I'd like--I've got--I want to tell you----'

'After breakfast,' said Miss Entwhistle briskly. 'We shall need lots of
time, and to be undisturbed. We'll go up into the drawing-room.'

And immediately she began talking about other things.

Was it possible, thought Lucy, her eyes carefully on her toast and
butter, that Aunt Dot suspected?



IX


It was not only possible, but the fact. Aunt Dot had suspected, only she
hadn't suspected anything like all that was presently imparted to her,
and she found great difficulty in assimilating it. And two hours later
Lucy, standing in the middle of the drawing-room, was still passionately
saying to her, and saying it for perhaps the tenth time, 'But don't you
_see_? It's just _because_ what happened to him was so awful. It's
nature asserting itself. If he couldn't be engaged now, if he couldn't
reach up out of such a pit of blackness and get into touch with living
things again and somebody who sympathises and--is fond of him, he would
die, die or go mad; and oh, what's the _use_ to the world of somebody
good and fine being left to die or go mad? Aunt Dot, what's the _use_?'

And her aunt, sitting in her customary chair by the fireplace, continued
to assimilate with difficulty. Also her face was puckered into folds of
distress. She was seriously upset.

Lucy, looking at her, felt a kind of despair that she wasn't being able
to make her aunt, whom she loved, see what she saw, understand what she
understood, and so be, as she was, filled with confidence and happiness.
Not that she was happy at that moment; she, too, was seriously upset,
her face flushed, her eyes bright with effort to get Wemyss as she knew
him, as he so simply was, through into her aunt's consciousness.

She had made her clean breast with a completeness that had included the
confession that she did know what Mrs. Wemyss's accident had been, and
she had described it. Her aunt was painfully shocked. Anything so
horrible as that hadn't entered her mind. To fall past the very window
her husband was sitting at ... it seemed to her dreadful that Lucy
should be mixed up in it, and mixed up so instantly on the death of her
natural protector,--of her two natural protectors, for hadn't Mrs.
Wemyss as long as she existed also been one? She was bewildered, and
couldn't understand the violent reactions that Lucy appeared to look
upon as so natural in Wemyss. She would have concluded that she didn't
understand because she was too old, because she was out of touch with
the elasticities of the younger generation, but Wemyss must be very
nearly as old as herself. Certainly he was of the same generation; and
yet behold him, within a fortnight of his wife's most shocking death,
able to forget her, able to fall in love----

'But that's _why_--that's _why_,' Lucy cried when Miss Entwhistle said
this. 'He _had_ to forget, or die himself. It was beyond what anybody
could bear and stay sane----'

'I'm sure I'm very glad he should stay sane,' said Miss Entwhistle, more
and more puckered, 'but I can't help wishing it hadn't been you, Lucy,
who are assisting him to stay it.'

And then she repeated what at intervals she had kept on repeating with a
kind of stubborn helplessness, that her quarrel with Mr. Wemyss was that
he had got happy so very quickly.

'Those grey trousers,' she murmured.

No; Miss Entwhistle couldn't get over it. She couldn't understand it.
And Lucy, expounding and defending Wemyss in the middle of the room with
all the blaze and emotion of what was only too evidently genuine love,
was to her aunt an astonishing sight. That little thing, defending that
enormous man. Jim's daughter; Jim's cherished little daughter....

Miss Entwhistle, sitting in her chair, struggled among other struggles
to be fair, and reminded herself that Mr. Wemyss had proved himself to
be most kind and eager to help down in Cornwall,--though even on this
there was shed a new and disturbing light, and that now that she knew
everything, and the doubts that had made her perhaps be a little unjust
were out of the way and she could begin to consider him impartially, she
would probably very soon become sincerely attached to him. She hoped so
with all her heart. She was used to being attached to people. It was
normal to her to like and be liked. And there must be something more in
him than his fine appearance for Lucy to be so very fond of him.

She gave herself a shake. She told herself she was taking this thing
badly; that she ought not, just because it was an unusual situation, be
so ready to condemn it. Was she really only a conventional spinster,
shrinking back shocked at a touch of naked naturalness? Wasn't there
much in what that short-haired child was so passionately saying about
the rightness, the saneness, of reaction from horror? Wasn't it nature's
own protection against too much death? After all, what was the good of
doubling horror, of being so much horrified at the horrible that you
stayed rooted there and couldn't move, and became, with your starting
eyes and bristling hair, a horror yourself?

Better, of course, to pass on, as Lucy was explaining, to get on with
one's business, which wasn't death but life. Still--there were the
decencies. However desolate one would be in retirement, however much one
would suffer, there was a period, Miss Entwhistle felt, during which the
bereaved withdrew. Instinctively. The really bereaved _would_ want to
withdraw----

'Ah, but don't you _see_,' Lucy once more tried despairingly to explain,
'this wasn't just being bereaved--this was something simply too awful.
Of course Everard would have behaved in the ordinary way if it had been
an ordinary death.'

'So that the more terrible one's sorrow the more cheerfully one goes out
to tea,' said Miss Entwhistle, the remembrance of the light trousers at
one end of Wemyss and the unmistakably satisfied face at the other being
for a moment too much for her.

'Oh,' almost moaned Lucy at that, and her head drooped in a sudden
fatigue.

Miss Entwhistle got up quickly and put her arms round her. 'Forgive me,'
she said. 'That was just stupid and cruel. I think I'm hide-bound. I
think I've probably got into a rut. Help me out of it, Lucy. You shall
teach me to take heroic views----'

And she kissed her hot face tenderly, holding it close to her own.

'But if I could only make you _see_,' said Lucy, clinging to her, tears
in her voice.

'But I do see that you love him very much,' said Miss Entwhistle gently,
again very tenderly kissing her.

That afternoon when Wemyss appeared at five o'clock, it being his
bi-weekly day for calling, he found Lucy alone.

'Why, where----? How-----?' he asked, peeping round the drawing-room as
though Miss Entwhistle must be lurking behind a chair.

'I've told,' said Lucy, who looked tired.

Then he clasped her with a great hug to his heart. 'Everard's own little
love,' he said, kissing and kissing her. 'Everard's own good little
love.'

'Yes, but----' began Lucy faintly. She was, however, so much muffled and
engulfed that her voice didn't get through.

'Now wasn't I right?' he said triumphantly, holding her tight. 'Isn't
this as it should be? Just you and me, and nobody to watch or
interfere?'

'Yes, but----' began Lucy again.

'What do you say? "Yes, but?"' laughed Wemyss, bending his ear. 'Yes
without any but, you precious little thing. Buts don't exist for
us--only yeses.'

And on these lines the interview continued for quite a long time before
Lucy succeeded in telling him that her aunt had been much upset.

Wemyss minded that so little that he didn't even ask why. He was
completely incurious about anything her aunt might think. 'Who cares?'
he said, drawing her to his heart again. 'Who cares? We've got each
other. What does anything else matter? If you had fifty aunts, all being
upset, what would it matter? What can it matter to us?'

And Lucy, who was exhausted by her morning, felt too as she nestled
close to him that nothing did matter so long as he was there. But the
difficulty was that he wasn't there most of the time, and her aunt was,
and she loved her aunt and did very much hate that she should be upset.

She tried to convey this to Wemyss, but he didn't understand. When it
came to Miss Entwhistle he was as unable to understand Lucy as Miss
Entwhistle was unable to understand her when it came to Wemyss. Only
Wemyss didn't in the least mind not understanding. Aunts. What were
they? Insects. He laughed, and said his little love couldn't have it
both ways; she couldn't eat her cake, which was her Everard, and have it
too, which was her aunt; and he kissed her hair and asked who was a
complicated little baby, and rocked her gently to and fro in his arms,
and Lucy was amused at that and laughed too, and forgot her aunt, and
forgot everything except how much she loved him.

Meanwhile Miss Entwhistle was spending a diligent afternoon in the
newspaper room of the British Museum. She was reading _The Times_ report
of the Wemyss accident and inquest; and if she had been upset by what
Lucy told her in the morning she was even more upset by what she read in
the afternoon. Lucy hadn't mentioned that suggestion of suicide. Perhaps
he hadn't told her. Suicide. Well, there had been no evidence. There was
an open verdict. It had been a suggestion made by a servant, perhaps a
servant with a grudge. And even if it had been true, probably the poor
creature had discovered she had some incurable disease, or she may have
had some loss that broke her down temporarily, and--oh, there were many
explanations; respectable, ordinary explanations.

Miss Entwhistle walked home slowly, loitering at shop windows, staring
at hats and blouses that she never saw, spinning out her walk to its
utmost, trying to think. Suicide. How desolate it sounded on that
beautiful afternoon. Such a giving up. Such a defeat. Why should she
have given up? Why should she have been defeated? But it wasn't true.
The coroner had said there was no evidence to show how she came by her
death.

Miss Entwhistle walked slower and slower. The nearer she got to Eaton
Terrace the more unwillingly did she advance. When she reached Belgrave
Square she went right round it twice, lingering at the garden railings
studying the habits of birds. She had been out all the afternoon, and,
as those who have walked it know, it is a long way from the British
Museum to Eaton Terrace. Also it was a hot day and her feet ached, and
she very much would have liked to be in her own chair in her cool
drawing-room having her tea. But there in that drawing-room would
probably still be Mr. Wemyss, no longer now to be Mr. Wemyss for
her--would she really have to call him Everard?--or she might meet him
on the stairs--narrow stairs; or in the hall--also narrow, which he
would fill up; or on her doorstep she might meet him, filling up her
doorstep; or, when she turned the corner into her street, there, coming
towards her, might be the triumphant trousers.

No, she felt she couldn't stand seeing him that day. So she lingered
forlornly watching the sparrows inside the garden railings of Belgrave
Square, balancing first on one and then on the other of those feet that
ached.

This was only the beginning, she thought; this was only the first of
many days for her of wandering homelessly round. Her house was too small
to hold both herself and love-making. If it had been the slender
love-making of the young man who was so doggedly devoted to Lucy, she
felt it wouldn't have been too small. He would have made love
youthfully, shyly. She could have sat quite happily in the dining-room
while the suitably paired young people dallied delicately together
overhead. But she couldn't bear the thought of being cramped up so near
Mr. Wemyss's--no, Everard's; she had better get used to that at
once--love-making. His way of courting wouldn't be,--she searched about
in her uneasy mind for a word, and found vegetarian. Yes; that word
sufficiently indicated what she meant: it wouldn't be vegetarian.

Miss Entwhistle drifted away from the railings, and turning her back on
her own direction wandered towards Sloane Street. There she saw an
omnibus stopping to let some one out. Wanting very much to sit down she
made an effort and caught it, and squeezing herself into its vacant seat
gave herself up to wherever it should take her.

It took her to the City; first to the City, and then to strange places
beyond. She let it take her. Her clothes became steadily more
fashionable the farther the omnibus went. She ended by being conspicuous
and stared at. But she was determined to give the widest margin to the
love-making and go the whole way, and she did.

For an hour and a half the omnibus went on and on. She had no idea
omnibuses did such things. When it finally stopped she sat still; and
the conductor, who had gradually come to share the growing surprise of
the relays of increasingly poor passengers, asked her what address she
wanted.

She said she wanted Sloane Street.

He was unable to believe it, and tried to reason with her, but she sat
firm in her place and persisted.

At nine o'clock he put her down where he had taken her up. She
disappeared into the darkness with the movements of one who is stiff,
and he winked at the passenger nearest the door and touched his
forehead.

But as she climbed wearily and hungrily up her steps and let herself in
with her latchkey, she felt it had been well worth it; for that one day
at least she had escaped Mr. We---- no, Everard.



X


Miss Entwhistle, however, made up her mind very firmly that after this
one afternoon of giving herself up to her feelings she was going to
behave in the only way that is wise when faced by an inevitable
marriage, the way of sympathy and friendliness.

Too often had she seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at
the marriages of their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter
of doggedness and principle, and finally become an attitude unable to be
altered, long after years had made it ridiculous. If the marriages
turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if
they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.

Thus Miss Entwhistle reasoned that first sleepless night in bed, and
on these lines she proceeded during the next few months. They were
trying months. She used up all she had of gallantry in sticking to
her determination. Lucy's instinct had been sound, that wish to keep
her engagement secret from her aunt for as long as possible. Miss
Entwhistle, always thin, grew still more thin in her constant daily and
hourly struggle to be pleased, to enter into Lucy's happiness, to make
things easy for her, to protect her from the notice and inquiry of their
friends, to look hopefully and with as much of Lucy's eyes as she could
at Everard and at the future.

'She isn't simple enough,' Wemyss would say to Lucy if ever she said
anything about her aunt's increasing appearance of strain and overwork.
'She should take things more naturally. Look at us.' For it was the
one fly in Lucy's otherwise perfect ointment, this intermittent
consciousness that her aunt wasn't altogether happy.

And then he would ask her, laying his head on hers as he stood with his
arms about her, who had taught his little girl to be simple; and they
would laugh, and kiss, and talk of other things.

Miss Entwhistle was unable to be simple in Wemyss's sense. She tried
to; for when she saw his fresh, unlined face, his forehead without a
wrinkle on it, and compared it in the glass with her own which was
only three years older, she thought there must be a good deal to be
said for single-mindedness. It was Lucy who told her Everard was so
single-minded. He took one thing at a time, she said, concentrating
quietly. When he had completely finished it off then, and not till then,
he went on to the next. He knew his own mind. Didn't Aunt Dot think it
was a great thing to know one's own mind? Instead of wobbling about,
wasting one's thoughts and energies on side-shows?

This was the very language of Wemyss; and Miss Entwhistle, after having
been listening to him in the afternoon--for every time he came she put
in a brief appearance just for the look of the thing, and on the
Saturday and Sunday outings she was invariably present the whole
time--felt it a little hard that when at last she had reached the end of
the day and the harbour of her empty drawing-room she should, through
the mouth of Lucy, have to listen to him all the evening as well.

But she always agreed, and said Yes, he was a great dear; for when an
only and much-loved niece is certainly going to marry, the least a wise
aunt can call her future nephew is a great dear. She will make this
warmer and more varied if she can, but at least she will say that much.
Miss Entwhistle tried to think of variations, afraid Lucy might notice a
certain sameness, and once with an effort she faltered out that he
seemed to be a--a real darling; but it had a hollow sound, and she
didn't repeat it. Besides, Lucy was quite satisfied with the other.

She used, sitting at her aunt's feet in the evenings--Wemyss never came
in the evenings because he distrusted the probable dinner--sometimes to
make her aunt say it again, by asking a little anxiously, 'But you _do_
think him a great dear, don't you, Aunt Dot?' Whereupon Miss Entwhistle,
afraid her last expression of that opinion may have been absent-minded,
would hastily exclaim with almost excess of emphasis, 'Oh, a _great_
dear.'

Perhaps he was a dear. She didn't know. What had she against him? She
didn't know. He was too old, that was one thing; but the next minute,
after hearing something he had said or laughed at, she thought he wasn't
old enough. Of course what she really had against him was that he had
got over his wife's shocking death so quickly. Yet she admitted there
was much in Lucy's explanation of this as a sheer instinctive gesture of
self-defence. Besides, she couldn't keep it up as a grudge against him
for ever; with every day it mattered less. And sometimes Miss Entwhistle
even doubted whether it was this that mattered to her at all,--whether
it was not rather some quite small things that she really objected to: a
want of fastidiousness, for instance, a forgetfulness of the minor
courtesies,--the objections, in a word, she told herself smiling, of an
old maid. Lucy seemed not to mind his blunders in these directions in
the least. She seemed positively, thought her aunt, to take a kind of
pride in them, delighting in everything he said or did with the adoring
tenderness of a young mother watching the pranks of her first-born. She
laughed gaily; she let him caress her openly. She too, thought Miss
Entwhistle, had become what she no doubt would say was single-minded.
Well, perhaps all this was a spinster's way of feeling about a type not
previously met with, and she had got--again she reproached herself--into
an elderly groove. Jim's friends,--well, they had been different, but
not necessarily better. Mr. Wemyss would call them, she was sure, a
finicking lot.

When in October London began to fill again, and Jim's friends came to
look her and Lucy up and showed a tendency, many of them, to keep on
doing it, a new struggle was added to her others, the struggle to
prevent their meeting Wemyss. He wouldn't, she was convinced, be able to
hide his proprietorship in Lucy, and Lucy wouldn't ever get that look of
tenderness out of her eyes when they rested on him. Questions as to who
he was would naturally be asked, and one or other of Jim's friends would
be sure to remember the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death; indeed, that day
she went to the British Museum and read the report of it she had been
amazed that she hadn't seen it at the time. It took up so much of the
paper that she was bound to have seen it if she had seen a paper at all.
She could only suppose that as she was visiting friends just then, she
chanced that day to have been in the act of leaving or arriving, and
that if she bought a paper on the journey she had looked, as was
sometimes her way in trains, not at it but out of the window.

She felt she hadn't the strength to support being questioned, and in her
turn have to embark on the explanation and defence of Wemyss. There was
too much of him, she felt, to be explained. He ought to be separated
into sections, and taken gradually and bit by bit,--but far best not to
produce him, to keep him from meeting her friends. She therefore
arranged a day in the week when she would be at home, and discouraged
every one from the waste of time of trying to call on her on other days.
Then presently the afternoon became an evening once a week, when whoever
liked could come in after dinner and talk and drink coffee, because the
evening was safer; made safe by Wemyss's conviction--he hadn't concealed
it--that the dinners of maiden ladies were notoriously both scanty and
bad.

Lucy would have preferred never to see a soul except Wemyss, who was all
she wanted, all she asked for in life; but she did see her aunt's point,
that only by pinning their friends to a day and an hour could the risk
of their overflowing into precious moments be avoided. This is how Miss
Entwhistle put it to her, wondering as she said it at her own growing
ability in artfulness.

She had an old friend living in Chesham Street, a widow full of that
ripe wisdom that sometimes comes at the end to those who have survived
marriage; and to her, when the autumn brought her back to London, Miss
Entwhistle went occasionally in search of comfort.

'What in the whole world puts such a gulf between two affections and
comprehensions as a new love?' she asked one day, freshly struck,
because of something Lucy had said, by the distance she had travelled.
Lucy was quite a tiny figure now, so far away from her had she moved;
she couldn't even get her voice to carry to her, much less still hold on
to her with her hands.

And the friend, made brief of speech by wisdom, said: 'Nothing.'

About Wemyss's financial position Miss Entwhistle could only judge from
appearances, for it wouldn't have occurred to him that it might perhaps
be her concern to know, and she preferred to wait till later, when the
engagement could be talked about, to ask some old friend of Jim's to
make the proper inquiries; but from the way he lived it seemed to be an
easy one. He went freely in taxis, he hired cars with a reasonable
frequency, he inhabited one of the substantial houses of Lancaster Gate,
and also, of course, he had The Willows, the house on the river near
Strorley where his wife had died. After all, what could be better than
two houses, Miss Entwhistle thought, congratulating herself, as it were,
on Lucy's behalf that this side of Wemyss was so satisfactory. Two
houses, and no children; how much better than the other way about. And
one day, feeling almost hopeful about Lucy's prospects, on the
advantages of which she had insisted that her mind should dwell, she
went round again to the widow in Chesham Street and said suddenly to
her, who was accustomed to these completely irrelevant exclamatory
inquiries from her friend, and who being wise was also incurious, 'What
can be better than two houses?'

To which the widow, whose wisdom was more ripe than comforting, replied
disappointingly: 'One.'

Later, when the marriage loomed very near, Miss Entwhistle, who found
that she was more than ever in need of reassurance instead of being, as
she had hoped to become, more reconciled, went again, in a kind of
desperation this time, to the widow, seeking some word from her who was
so wise that would restore her to tranquillity, that would dispel her
absurd persistent doubts. 'After all,' she said almost entreatingly,
'what can be better than a devoted husband?'

And the widow, who had had three and knew what she was talking about,
replied with the large calm of those who have finished and can in
leisure weigh and reckon up: 'None.'



XI


The Wemyss-Entwhistle engagement proceeded on its way of development
through the ordinary stages of all engagements: secrecy complete,
secrecy partial, semi-publicity, and immediately after that entire
publicity, with its inevitable accompanying uproar. The uproar, always
more or less audible to the protagonists, of either approval or
disapproval, was in this case one of unanimous disapproval. Lucy's
father's friends protested to a man. The atmosphere at Eaton Terrace was
convulsed; and Lucy, running as she always did to hide from everything
upsetting into Wemyss's arms, was only made more certain than ever that
there alone was peace.

This left Miss Entwhistle to face the protests by herself. There was
nothing for it but to face them. Jim had had so many intimate, devoted
friends, and each of them apparently regarded his daughter as his
special care and concern. One or two of the younger ones, who had been
disciples rather than friends, were in love with her themselves, and
these were specially indignant and vocal in their indignation. Miss
Entwhistle found herself in the position she had tried so hard to
avoid, that of defending and explaining Wemyss to a highly sceptical,
antagonistic audience. It was as if, forced to fight for him, she was
doing so with her back to her drawing-room wall.

Lucy couldn't help her, because though she was distressed that her aunt
should be being worried because of her affairs, yet she did feel that
Everard was right when he said that her affairs concerned nobody in the
world but herself and him. She, too, was indignant, but her indignation
was because her father's friends, who had been ever since she could
remember always good and kind, besides perfectly intelligent and
reasonable, should with one accord, and without knowing anything about
Everard except that story of the accident, be hostile to her marrying
him. The ready unfairness, the willingness immediately to believe the
worst instead of the best, astonished and shocked her. And then the way
they all talked! Everlasting arguments and reasoning and hair-splitting;
so clever, so impossible to stand up against, and yet so surely, she was
certain, if only she had been clever too and able to prove things,
wrong. All their multitudinous points of view,--why, there was only one
point of view about a thing, Everard said, and that was the right one.
Ah, but what a woman wanted wasn't this; she didn't want this endless
thinking and examining and dissecting and considering. A woman--her very
thoughts were now dressed in Wemyss's words--only wanted her man. '"Hers
not to reason why,"' Wemyss had quoted one day, and both of them had
laughed at his parody, '"hers but to love and--not die, but live."'

The most that could be said for her father's friends was that they
meant well; but oh, what trouble the well-meaning could bring into an
otherwise simple situation! From them she hid--it was inevitable--in
Wemyss's arms. Here were no arguments; here were no misgivings
and paralysing hesitations. Here was just simple love, and the
feeling--delicious to her whose mother had died in the very middle of
all the sweet early petting, and whose whole life since had been spent
entirely in the dry and bracing company of unusually inquisitive-minded,
clever men--of being a baby again in somebody's big, comfortable,
uncritical lap.

The engagement hadn't leaked out so much as flooded out. It would have
continued secret for quite a long time, known only to the three and to
the maids--who being young women themselves, and well acquainted with
the symptoms of the condition, were sure of it before Miss Entwhistle
had even begun to suspect,--if Wemyss hadn't taken to dropping in,
contrary to expectations, on the Thursday evenings. Lucy's descriptions
of these evenings and of the people who came, and of how very kind they
were to her aunt and herself, and how anxious they were to help her,
they of course supposing that she was, actually, the lonely thing she
would have been if she hadn't had Everard as the dear hidden background
to her life--at this point they embraced,--at first amused him, then
made him curious, and finally caused him to come and see for himself.

He didn't tell Lucy he was coming, he just came. It had taken him five
Thursday evenings of playing bridge as usual at his club, playing it
with one hand, as he said to her afterwards, and thinking of her with
the other--'You know what I mean,' he said, and they laughed and
embraced--before it slowly oozed into and pervaded his mind that there
was his little girl, rounded by people fussing over her and making love
to her (because, said Wemyss, everybody would naturally want to make
love to her), and there was he, the only person who had a right to do
this, somewhere else.

So he walked in; and when he walked in, the group standing round Lucy
with their backs to the door saw her face, which had been gently
attentive, suddenly flash into colour and light; and turning with one
accord to see what it was she was looking at behind them with parted
lips and eyes of startled joy, beheld once more the unknown chief
mourner of the funeral in Cornwall.

Down there they had taken for granted that he was a relation of Jim's,
the kind of relative who in a man's life appears only three times, the
last of which is his funeral; here in Eaton Terrace they were
immediately sure he was not, anyhow, that, because for relatives who
only appear those three times a girl's face doesn't change in a flash
from gentle politeness to tremulous, shining life. They all stared at
him astonished. He was so different from the sorts of people they had
met at Jim's. For one thing he was so well dressed,--in the mating
season, thought Miss Entwhistle, even birds dress well,--and in his
impressive evening clothes, with what seemed a bigger and more spotless
shirt-front than any shirt-front they could have imagined, he made them
look and feel what they actually were, a dingy, shabby lot.

Wemyss was good-looking. He might be middle-aged, but he was
good-looking enough frequently to eclipse the young. He might have a
little too much of what tailors call a fine presence, but his height
carried this off. His features were regular, his face care-free and
healthy, his brown hair sleek with no grey in it, he was clean-shaven,
and his mouth was the kind of mouth sometimes described by journalists
as mobile, sometimes as determined, but always as well cut. One could
visualise him in a fur-lined coat, thought a young man near Lucy,
considering him; and one couldn't visualise a single one of the others,
including himself, in the room that evening in a fur-lined coat. Also,
thought this same young man, one could see railway porters and
taxi-drivers and waiters hurrying to be of service to him; and one not
only couldn't imagine them taking any notice that wasn't languid and
reluctant of the others, including himself, but one knew from personal
distressing experience that they didn't.

'My splendid lover!' Lucy's heart cried out within her when the door
opened and there he stood. She had not seen him before in the evening,
and the contrast between him and the rest of the people there was really
striking.

Miss Entwhistle had been right: there was no hiding the look in Lucy's
eyes or Wemyss's proprietary manner. He hadn't meant to take any but the
barest notice of his little girl, he had meant to be quite an ordinary
guest--just shake hands and say 'Hasn't it been wet to-day'--that sort
of thing; but his pride and love were too much for him, he couldn't hide
them. He thought he did, and was sure he was behaving beautifully and
with the easiest unconcern, but the mere way he looked at her and stood
over her was enough. Also there was the way she looked at him. The
intelligences in that room were used to drawing more complicated
inferences than this. They were outraged by its obviousness. Who was
this middle-aged, prosperous outsider who had got hold of Jim's
daughter? What had her aunt been about? Where had he dropped from? Had
Jim known?

Miss Entwhistle introduced him. 'Mr. Wemyss,' she said to them
generally, with a vague wave of her hand; and a red spot appeared and
stayed on each of her cheekbones.

Wemyss held forth. He stood on the hearthrug filling his pipe--he was
used to smoking in that room when he came to tea with Lucy, and forgot
to ask Miss Entwhistle if it mattered--and told everybody what he
thought. They were talking about Ireland when he came in, and after the
disturbance of his arrival had subsided he asked them not to mind him
but to go on. He then proceeded to go on himself, telling them what he
thought; and what he thought was what _The Times_ had thought that
morning. Wemyss spoke with the practised fluency of a leading article.
He liked politics and constantly talked them at his club, and it created
vacancies in the chairs near him. But Lucy, who hadn't heard him on
politics before and found that she could understand every word, listened
to him with parted lips. Before he came in they had been saying things
beyond her quickness in following, eagerly discussing Sinn Fein,
Lloyd George, the outrageous cost of living--it was the autumn of
1920--turning everything inside out, upside down, being witty, being
surprising, being tremendously eager and earnest. It had been a kind of
restless flashing round and catching fire from each other,--a kind of
kick, and flick, and sparks, and a burst of laughter, and then on to
something else just as she was laboriously getting under weigh to follow
the last sentence but six. She had been missing her father, who took her
by the hand on these occasions when he saw her lagging behind, and
stopped a moment to explain to her, and held up the others while she got
her breath.

But now came Everard, and in a minute everything was plain. He had the
effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight
being let in. He was so sensible, she felt, compared to these others; so
healthy and natural. The Government, he said, only had to do this and
that, and Ireland and the cost of living would immediately, regarded as
problems, be solved. He explained the line to be taken. It was a very
simple line. One only needed goodwill and a little common sense. Why,
thought Lucy, unconsciously nodding proud agreement, didn't people have
goodwill and a little common sense?

At first there was a disposition to interrupt, to heckle, but it grew
fainter and soon gave way to complete silence. The other guests might
have been stunned, Miss Entwhistle thought, so motionless did they
presently sit. And when they went away, which they seemed to do earlier
than usual and in a body, Wemyss was still standing on the hearthrug
explaining the points of view of the ordinary, sensible business man.

'Mind you,' he said, pointing at them with his pipe, 'I don't pretend to
be a great thinker. I'm just a plain business man, and as a plain
business man I know there's only one way of doing a thing, and that's
the right way. Find out what that way is, and go and do it. There's too
much arguing altogether and asking other people what they think. We
don't want talk, we want action. I agree with Napoleon, who said
concerning the French Revolution, _"Il aurait fallu mitrailler cette
canaille."_ We're not simple enough.'

This was the last the others heard as they trooped in silence down the
stairs. Outside they lingered for a while in little knots on the
pavement talking, and then they drifted away to their various homes,
where most of them spent the rest of the evening writing to Miss
Entwhistle.

The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague
and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy's aunt to himself,
and on the ground of being Jim's most devoted friend ask her straight
questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why.
Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be
and do it somewhere else; but they arrived determined to get an answer
to the third question: Why Wemyss? And when they got there, there he was
again; there before them this time, standing on the hearthrug as if he
had never moved off it since the week before and had gone on talking
ever since.

This was the end of the Thursday evenings. The next one was unattended,
except by Wemyss; but Miss Entwhistle had been forced to admit the
engagement, and from then on right up to the marriage her life was a
curse to her and a confusion. Just because Jim had appointed no guardian
in his will for Lucy, every single one of his friends felt bound to fill
the vacancy. They were indignant when they discovered that almost before
they had begun Lucy was being carried off, but they were horrified when
they discovered what Wemyss it was who was carrying her off. Most of
them quite well remembered the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death a few weeks
before, and those who did not went, as Miss Entwhistle had gone, to the
British Museum and read it up. They also, though they themselves were
chiefly unworldly persons who lost money rather than made it, instituted
the most searching private inquiries into Wemyss's business affairs,
hoping that he might be caught out as such a rascal or so penniless, or,
preferably, both, that no woman could possibly have anything to do with
him. But Wemyss's business record, the solicitor they employed informed
them, was quite creditable. Everything about it was neat and in order.
He was not what the City would call a wealthy man, but if you went out
say to Ealing, said the solicitor, he would be called wealthy. He was
solid, and he was certainly more than able to support a wife and family.
He could have been quite wealthy if he had not adopted a principle to
which he had adhered for years of knocking off work early and leaving
his office at an hour when other men did not,--the friends were obliged
to admit that this, at least, seemed sensible. There had been, though, a
very sad occurrence recently in his private life,--'Oh, thank you,'
interrupted the friends, 'we have heard about that.'

But however good Wemyss's business record might be, it couldn't alter
their violent objection to Jim's daughter marrying him. Apart from the
stuff he talked, there was the inquest. They were aware that in this
they were unreasonable, but they were all too much attached to Jim's
memory to be able to be reasonable about a man they felt so certain he
wouldn't have liked. Singly and in groups they came at safe times, such
as after breakfast, to Eaton Terrace to reason with Lucy, too much
worried to remember that you cannot reason with a person in love. Less
wise than Miss Entwhistle, they tried to dissuade her from marrying this
man, and the more they tried the tighter she clung to him. To the
passion of love was added, by their attitudes, the passion of
protectiveness, of flinging her body between him and them. And all the
while, right inside her innermost soul, in spite of her amazement at
them and her indignation, she was smiling to herself; for it was really
very funny, the superficial judgments of these clever people when set
side by side with what she alone knew,--the tenderness, the simple
goodness of her heart's beloved.

Lucy laughed to herself in her happy sureness. She had miraculously
found not only a lover she could adore and a guide she could follow and
a teacher she could look up to and a sufferer who without her wouldn't
have been healed, but a mother, a nurse, and a playmate. In spite of his
being so much older and so extraordinarily wise, he was yet her
contemporary,--sometimes hardly even that, so boyish was he in his talk
and jokes. Lucy had never had a playmate. She had spent her life
sitting, as it were, bolt upright mentally behaving, and she hadn't
known till Wemyss came on the scene how delicious it was to relax.
Nonsense had delighted her father, it is true, but it had to be of a
certain kind; never the kind to which the adjective 'sheer' would apply.
With Wemyss she could say whatever nonsense came into her head, sheer or
otherwise. He laughed consumedly at her when she talked it. She loved to
make him laugh. They laughed together. He understood her language. He
was her playmate. Those people outside, old and young, who didn't know
what playing was and were trying to get her away from him, might beat at
the door behind which he and she sat listening, amused, as long as they
liked.

'How they all try to separate us,' she said to him one day, sitting as
usual safe in the circle of his arm, her head on his breast.

'You can't separate unity,' remarked Wemyss comfortably.

She wanted to tell them that answer, confront them with it next time
they came after breakfast, as a discouragement to useless further
effort, but she had learned that they somehow always knew when what she
said was Everard's and not hers, and then, of course, prejudiced as they
were, they wouldn't listen.

'Now, Lucy, that's pure Wemyss,' they would say. 'For heaven's sake say
something of your own.'

At Christmas Wemyss had an encounter with Miss Entwhistle, who ever
since she had been told of the engagement had been so quiet and
inoffensive that he quite liked her. She had seemed to recognise her
position as a side-show, and had accepted it without a word. She no
longer asked him questions, and she made no difficulties. She left him
alone with Lucy in Eaton Terrace, and though she had to go with them on
the outings she asserted herself so little that he forgot she was there.
But when towards the middle of December he remarked one afternoon that
he always spent Christmas at The Willows, and what day would she and
Lucy come down, Christmas Eve or the day before, to his astonishment she
looked astonished, and after a silence said it was most kind of him, but
they were going to spend Christmas where they were.

'I had hoped you would join us,' she said. 'Must you really go away?'

'But----' began Wemyss, incredulous, doubting his ears.

It was, however, the fact that Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The
Willows; and of course if she wouldn't Lucy couldn't either. Nothing
that he said could shake her determination. Here was a repetition, only
how much worse--fancy spoiling his Christmas--of her conduct in Cornwall
when she insisted on going away from that nice little house where they
were all so comfortably established, and taking Lucy up to London. He
had forgotten, so acquiescent had she been for weeks, that down there he
had discovered she was obstinate. It was a shock to him to realise that
her obstinacy, the most obstinate obstinacy he had ever met, might be
going to upset his plans. He couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe he
wasn't going to be able to have what he wished, and only because an old
maid said 'No.' Was the story of Balaam to be reversed, and the angel be
held up by the donkey? He refused to believe such a thing possible.

Wemyss, who made his plans first and talked about them afterwards,
hadn't mentioned Christmas even to Lucy. It was his habit to settle what
he wished to do, arrange all the details, and then, when everything was
ready, inform those who were to take part. It hadn't occurred to him
that over the Christmas question there would be trouble. He had
naturally taken it for granted that he would spend Christmas with his
little girl, and of course as he always spent it at The Willows she
would spend it there too. All his arrangements were made, and the
servants, who looked surprised, had been told to get the spare-rooms
ready for two ladies. He had begun to feel seasonable as early as the
first week in December, and had bespoken two big turkeys instead of one,
because this was to be his first real Christmas at The Willows--Vera had
been without the Christmas spirit--and he felt it couldn't be celebrated
lavishly enough. Two where there had in previous years been one,--that
was the turkeys; four where there had been two,---that was the plum
puddings. He doubled everything. Doubling seemed the proper, even the
symbolic expression of his feelings, for wasn't he soon going to be
doubled himself? And how sweetly.

Then suddenly, having finished his preparations and proceeding, the
time being ripe, to the question of the day of arrival, he found
himself up against opposition. Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The
Willows--incredible, impossible, and insufferable,--while Lucy, instead
of instantly insisting and joining with him in a compelling majority,
sat as quiet as a mouse.

'But Lucy----' Wemyss having stared speechless at her aunt, turned to
her. 'But of course we must spend Christmas together.'

'Oh yes,' said Lucy, leaning forward, 'of course----'

'But of course you must come down. Why, any other arrangement is
unthinkable. My house is in the country, which is the proper place for
Christmas, and it's your Everard's house, and you haven't seen it
yet--why, I would have taken you down long ago, but I've been saving up
for this.'

'We hoped,' said Miss Entwhistle, 'you would join us here.'

'Here! But there isn't room to swing a turkey here. I've ordered two,
and each of them is twice too big to get through your front door.'

'Oh, Everard--have you actually ordered turkeys?' said Lucy.

She wanted to laugh, but she also wanted to cry. His simplicity was too
wonderful. In her eyes it set him apart from criticism and made him
sacred, like the nimbus about the head of a saint.

That he should have been secretly busy making preparations, buying
turkeys, planning a surprise, when all this time she had been supposing
that why he never mentioned The Willows was because he shrank both for
himself and for her from the house of his tragedy! There had never been
any talk of showing it to her, as there had about the house in Lancaster
Gate, and she had imagined he would never go near it again and was
probably quietly getting rid of it. He would want to get rid of it, of
course,--that house of unbearable memories. To the other one, the house
in Lancaster Gate, he had insisted on taking them to tea, and in spite
of a great desire not to go, plainly visible on her aunt's face and felt
too by herself, it had seemed after all a natural and more or less
inevitable thing, and they had gone. At least that poor Vera had only
lived there, and not died there. It was a gloomy house, and Lucy had
wanted him to give it up and start life with her in a place without
associations, but he had been so much astonished at the idea--'Why,' he
had cried, 'it was my father's house and I was born in it!'--that she
couldn't help laughing at his dismay, and was ashamed of herself for
having thought of uprooting him. Besides, she hadn't known he had been
born in it.

The Willows, however, was different. Of that he never spoke, and Lucy
had been sure of the pitiful, the delicate reason. Now it appeared that
all this time he had just been saving it up as a Christmas treat.

'Oh, Everard----!' she said, with a gasp. She hadn't reckoned with The
Willows. That The Willows should still be in Everard's life, and
actively so, not just lingering on while house agents were disposing of
it, but visited and evidently prized, came upon her as an immense shock.

'I think we can achieve a happy little Christmas for you here,' said her
aunt, smiling the smile she smiled when she found difficulty in smiling.
'Of course you and Lucy would want to be together. I ought to have told
you earlier that we were counting on you, but somehow Christmas comes on
one so unexpectedly.'

'Perhaps you'll tell me why you won't come to The Willows,' said Wemyss,
holding on to himself as she used to make him hold on to himself in
Cornwall. 'You realise, of course, that if you persist you spoil both
Lucy's and my Christmas.'

'Ah, but you mustn't put it that way,' said Miss Entwhistle, gentle but
determined. 'I promise you that you and Lucy shall be very happy here.'

'You haven't answered my question,' said Wemyss, slowly filling his
pipe.

'I don't think I'm going to,' said Miss Entwhistle, suddenly flaring up.
She hadn't flared up since she was ten, and was instantly ashamed of
herself, but there was something about Mr. Wemyss----

'I think,' she said, getting up and speaking very gently, 'you'll like
to be alone together now.' And she crossed to the door.

There she wavered, and turning round said more gently still, even
penitentially, 'If Lucy wishes to go to The Willows I'll--I'll accept
your kind invitation and take her. I leave it to her.'

Then she went out.

'That's all right then,' said Wemyss with a great sigh of relief,
smiling broadly at Lucy. 'Come here, little love,--come to your Everard,
and we'll fix it all up. Lord, what a kill-joy that woman is!'

And he put out his arms and drew her to him.



XII


But Christmas was spent after all at Eaton Terrace, and they lived on
Wemyss's turkeys and plum puddings for a fortnight.

It was not a very successful Christmas, because Wemyss was so profoundly
disappointed, and Miss Entwhistle had the apologeticness of those who
try to make up for having got their own way, and Lucy, who had shrunk
from The Willows far more than her aunt, wished many times before it was
over that they had after all gone there. It would have been much simpler
in the long run, and much less painful than having to look on at Everard
being disappointed; but at the time, and taken by surprise, she had felt
that she couldn't have borne festivities, and still less could she have
borne seeing Everard bearing festivities in that house.

'This is morbid,' he said, when in answer to his questioning she at last
told him it was poor Vera's dreadful death there that made her feel she
couldn't go; and he explained, holding her in his arms, how foolish it
was to be morbid, and how his little girl, who was marrying a healthy,
sensible man who, God knew, had had to fight hard enough to keep so--she
pressed closer--and yet had succeeded, must be healthily sensible too.
Otherwise, if she couldn't do this and couldn't do that because it
reminded her of something sad, and couldn't go here and couldn't go
there because of somebody's having died, he was afraid she would make
both herself and him very unhappy.

'Oh, Everard----' said Lucy at that, holding him tight, the thought of
making him unhappy, him, her own beloved who had been through such
terrible unhappiness already, giving her heart a stab.

His little girl must know, he continued, speaking with the grave voice
that was natural to him when he was serious, the voice not of the
playmate but of the man she adored, the man she was in love with, in
whose hands she could safely leave her earthly concerns,--his little
girl must know that somebody had died everywhere. There wasn't a spot,
there wasn't a house, except quite new ones----

'Oh yes, I know--but----' Lucy tried to interrupt.

And The Willows was his home, the home he had looked forward to and
worked for and had at last been able to afford to rent on a long lease,
a lease so long that it made it practically his very own, and he had
spent the last ten years developing and improving it, and there wasn't a
brick or a tree in it in which he didn't take an interest, really an
almost personal interest, and his one thought all these months had been
the day when he would show it to her, to its dear future mistress.

'Oh, Everard--yes--you shall--I want to----' said Lucy incoherently, her
cheek against his, 'only not yet--not festivities--please--I won't be so
morbid--I promise not to be morbid--but--please----'

And just when she was wavering, just when she was going to give in, not
because of his reasoning, for her instincts were stronger than his
reasoning, but because she couldn't bear his disappointment, Miss
Entwhistle, sure now of Lucy's dread of Christmas at The Willows,
suddenly turned firm again and announced that they would spend it in
Eaton Terrace.

So Wemyss was forced to submit. The sensation was so new to him that he
couldn't get over it. Once it was certain that his Christmas was, as he
insisted, spoilt, he left off talking about it and went to the other
extreme and was very quiet. That his little love should be so much under
the influence of her aunt saddened him, he told her. Lucy tried to bring
gaiety into this attitude by pointing out the proof she was giving him
of how very submissive she was to the person she happened to live
with,--'And presently all my submissiveness will be concentrated on
you,' she said gaily.

But he wouldn't be gay. He shook his head in silence and filled his
pipe. He was too deeply disappointed to be able to cheer up. And the
expression 'happen to live with,' jarred a little. There was an airy
carelessness about the phrase. One didn't happen to live with one's
husband; yet that had been the implication.

Every year in April Wemyss had a birthday; that is, unlike most people
of his age, he regularly celebrated it. Christmas and his birthday were
the festivals of the year for Him, and were always spent at The Willows.
He regarded his birthday, which was on the 4th of April, as the first
day of spring, defying the calendar, and was accustomed to find certain
yellow flowers in blossom down by the river on that date supporting his
contention. If these flowers came out before his birthday he took no
notice of them, treating them as non-existent, nor did he ever notice
them afterwards, for he did not easily notice flowers; but his gardener
had standing orders to have a bunch of them on the table that one
morning in the year to welcome him with their bright shiny faces when he
came down to his birthday breakfast, and coming in and seeing them he
said, 'My birthday and Spring's'; whereupon his wife--up to now it had
been Vera, but from now it would be Lucy--kissed him and wished him many
happy returns. This was the ritual; and when one year of abnormal cold
the yellow flowers weren't there at breakfast, because neither by the
river's edge nor in the most sheltered of the swamps had the
increasingly frantic gardener been able to find them, the entire
birthday was dislocated. He couldn't say on entering the room and
beholding them, 'My birthday and Spring's,' because he didn't behold
them; and his wife--that year Vera--couldn't kiss him and wish him many
happy returns because she hadn't the cue. She was so much used to the
cue that not having it made her forget her part,--forget, indeed, his
birthday altogether; and consequently it was a day of the extremest
spiritual chill and dinginess, matching the weather without. Wemyss had
been terribly hurt. He hoped never to spend another birthday like it.
Nor did he, for Vera remembered it after that.

Birthdays being so important to him, he naturally reflected after Miss
Entwhistle had spoilt his Christmas that she would spoil his birthday
too if he let her. Well, he wasn't going to let her. Not twice would he
be caught like that; not twice would he be caught in a position of
helplessness on his side and power on hers. The way to avoid it was very
simple: he would marry Lucy in time for his birthday. Why should they
wait any longer? Why stick to that absurd convention of the widower's
year? No sensible man minded what people thought. And who were the
people? Surely one didn't mind the opinions of those shabby weeds he had
met on the two Thursday evenings at Lucy's aunt's. The little they had
said had been so thoroughly unsound and muddled and yet dangerous, that
if they one and all emigrated to-morrow England would only be the
better. After meeting them he had said to Lucy, who had listened in some
wonder at this new light thrown on her father's friends, that they were
the very stuff of which successful segregation was made. In an island by
themselves, he told her, they would be quite happy undermining each
other's backbones, and the backbone of England, which consisted of plain
unspoilt patriots, would be let alone. They, certainly, didn't matter;
while as for his own friends, those friends who had behaved badly to him
on Vera's death, not only didn't he care twopence for their criticisms
but he could hardly wait for the moment when he would confound them by
producing for their inspection this sweetest of little girls, so young,
so devoted to him, Lucy his wife.

He accordingly proceeded to make all the necessary arrangements for
being married in March, for going for a trip to Paris, and for returning
to The Willows for the final few days of his honeymoon on the very day
of his birthday. What a celebration that would be! Wemyss, thinking of
it, shut his eyes so as to dwell upon it undisturbed. Never would he
have had a birthday like this next one. He might really quite fairly
call it his First, for he would be beginning life all over again, and
entering on years that would indeed be truthfully described as tender.

So much was it his habit to make plans privately and not mention them
till they were complete, that he found it difficult to tell Lucy of this
one in spite of the important part she was to play in it. But, after
all, some preparing would, he admitted to himself, be necessary even for
the secret marriage he had decided on at a registrar's office. She would
have to pack a bag; she would have to leave her belongings in order.
Also he might perhaps have to use persuasion. He knew his little girl
well enough to be sure she would relinquish church and white satin
without a murmur at his request, but she might want to tell her aunt of
the marriage's imminence, and then the aunt would, to a dead certainty,
obstruct, and either induce her to wait till the year was out, or, if
Lucy refused to do this, make her miserable with doubts as to whether
she had been right to follow her lover's wishes. Fancy making a girl
miserable because she followed her lover's wishes! What a woman, thought
Wemyss, filling his pipe. In his eyes Miss Entwhistle had swollen since
her conduct at Christmas to the bulk of a monster.

Having completed his preparations, and fixed his wedding day for the
first Saturday in March, Wemyss thought it time he told Lucy; so he did,
though not without a slight fear at the end that she might make
difficulties.

'My little love isn't going to do anything that spoils her Everard's
plans after all the trouble he has taken?' he said, seeing that with her
mouth slightly open she gazed at him in an obvious astonishment and
didn't say a word.

He then proceeded to shut the eyes that were gazing up into his, and the
surprised parted lips, with kisses, for he had discovered that gentle,
lingering kisses hushed Lucy quiet when she was inclined to say,
'But----' and brought her back quicker than anything to the mood of
tender, half-asleep acquiescence in which, as she lay in his arms, he
most loved her; then indeed she was his baby, the object of the
passionate protectiveness he felt he was naturally filled with, but for
the exercise of which circumstances up to now had given him no scope.
You couldn't passionately protect Vera. She was always in another room.

Lucy, however, did say, 'But----' when she recovered from her first
surprise, and did presently--directly, that is, he left off kissing her
and she could speak--make difficulties. Her aunt; the secrecy; why
secrecy; why not wait; it was so necessary under the circumstances to
wait.

And then he explained about his birthday.

At that she gazed at him again with a look of wonder in her eyes, and
after a moment began to laugh. She laughed a great deal, and with her
arm tight round his neck, but her eyes were wet. 'Oh, Everard,' she
said, her cheek against his, 'do you think we're really old enough to
marry?'

This time, however, he got his way. Lucy found she couldn't bring
herself to spoil his plans a second time; the spectacle of his prolonged
silent disappointment at Christmas was still too vividly before her. Nor
did she feel she could tell her aunt. She hadn't the courage to face her
aunt's expostulations and final distressed giving in. Her aunt, who
loomed so enormous in Wemyss's eyes, seemed to Lucy to be only half the
size she used to be. She seemed to have been worried small by her
position, like a bone among contending dogs, in the middle of different
indignations. What would be the effect on her of this final blow? The
thought of it haunted Lucy and spoilt all the last days before her
marriage, days which she otherwise would have loved, because she very
quickly became infected by the boyish delight and excitement over their
secret that made Wemyss hardly able to keep still in his chair. He
didn't keep still in it. Once at least he got up and did some slow steps
about the room, moving with an apparent solemnity because of not being
used to such steps, which he informed her presently were a dance. Till
he told her this she watched him too much surprised to say anything. So
did penguins dance in pictures. She couldn't think what was the matter
with him. When he had done, and told her, breathing a little hard, that
it was a dance symbolic of married happiness, she laughed and laughed,
and flew to hug him.

'Baby, oh, baby!' she said, rubbing her cheek up and down his coat.

'Who's another baby?' he asked, breathless but beaming.

Such was their conversation.

But poor Aunt Dot....

Lucy couldn't bear to think of poor little kind Aunt Dot. She had been
so wonderful, so patient, and she would be deeply horrified by a runaway
marriage. Never, never would she understand the reason for it. She
didn't a bit understand Everard, didn't begin to understand him, and
that his birthday should be a reason for breaking what she would regard
as the common decencies would of course only seem to her too childish to
be even discussed. Lucy was afraid Aunt Dot was going to be very much
upset, poor darling little Aunt Dot. Conscience-stricken, she couldn't
do enough for Aunt Dot now that the secret date was fixed. She watched
for every possible want during their times alone, flew to fetch things,
darted at dropped handkerchiefs, kissed her not only at bedtime and in
the morning but whenever there was the least excuse and with the utmost
tenderness; and every kiss and every look seemed to say, 'Forgive me.'

'Are they going to run away?' wondered Miss Entwhistle presently.

Lucy would have been immensely taken aback, and perhaps, such is one's
perversity, even hurt, if she could have seen the ray of hope which at
this thought lit her Aunt Dot's exhausted mind; for Miss Entwhistle's
life, which had been a particularly ordered and calm one up to the day
when Wemyss first called at Eaton Terrace, had since then been nothing
but just confused clamour. Everybody was displeased with her, and each
for directly opposite reasons. She had fallen on evil days, and they had
by February been going on so long that she felt worn out. Wemyss, she
was quite aware, disliked her heartily; her Jim was dead; Lucy, her one
living relation, so tenderly loved, was every day disappearing further
before her very eyes into Wemyss's personality, into what she sometimes
was betrayed by fatigue and impatience into calling to herself the
Wemyss maw; and her little house, which had always been so placid, had
become, she wearily felt, the cockpit of London. She used to crawl back
to it with footsteps that lagged more and more the nearer she got, after
her enforced prolonged daily outings--enforced and prolonged because the
house couldn't possibly hold both herself and Wemyss except for the
briefest moments,--and drearily wonder what letters she would find from
Jim's friends scolding her, and what fresh arrangements in the way of
tiring motor excursions, or invitations to tea at that dreadful house in
Lancaster Gate, would be sprung upon her. Did all engagements pursue
such a turbulent course? she asked herself,--she had given up asking the
oracle of Chesham Street anything because of her disconcerting answers.
How glad she was she had never been engaged; how glad she was she had
refused the offers she had had when she was a girl. Quite recently she
had met one of those would-be husbands in an omnibus, and how glad she
was when she looked at him that she had refused him. People don't keep
well, mused Miss Entwhistle. If Lucy would only refuse Wemyss now, how
glad she would be that she had when she met him in ten years' time in an
omnibus.

But these, of course, were merely the reflections of a tired-out
spinster, and she still had enough spirit to laugh at them to herself.
After all, whatever she might feel about Wemyss Lucy adored him, and
when anybody adores anybody as much as that, Miss Entwhistle thought,
the only thing to do is to marry and have done with it. No; that was
cynical. She meant, marry and not have done with it. Ah, if only the
child were marrying that nice young Teddy Trevor, her own age and so
devoted, and with every window-sill throughout his house in Chelsea the
proper height....

Miss Entwhistle was very unhappy all this time, besides having feet that
continually ached. Though she dreaded the marriage, yet she couldn't
help feeling that it would be delicious to be able once more to sit
down. How enchanting to sit quietly in her own empty drawing-room, and
not to have to walk about London any more. How enchanting not to make
any further attempts to persuade herself that she enjoyed Battersea
Park, and liked the Embankment, and was entertained by Westminster
Abbey. What she wanted with an increasing longing that amounted at last
to desperation as the winter dragged on, was her own chair by the fire
and an occasional middle-aged crony to tea. She had reached the time of
life when one likes sitting down. Also she had definitely got to the
period of cronies. One's contemporaries--people who had worn the same
kinds of clothes as oneself in girlhood, who remembered bishop's sleeves
and could laugh with one about bustles--how very much one longed for
one's contemporaries.

When, then, Lucy's behaviour suddenly became so markedly attentive and
so very tender, when she caught her looking at her with wistful
affection and flushing on being caught, when her good-nights and
good-mornings were many kisses instead of one, and she kept on jumping
up and bringing her teaspoons she hadn't asked for and sugar she didn't
want, Miss Entwhistle began to revive.

'Is it possible they're going to run away?' she wondered; and so much
reduced was she that she very nearly hoped so.



XIII


Lucy had meant to do exactly as Wemyss said and keep her marriage
secret, creeping out of the house quietly, going off with him abroad
after the registrar had bound them together, and telegraphing or writing
to her aunt from some safe distant place _en route_ like Boulogne; but
on saying good-night the evening before the wedding day, to her very
great consternation her aunt, whom she was in the act of kissing,
suddenly pushed her gently a little away, looked at her a moment, and
then holding her by both arms said with conviction, 'It's to-morrow.'

Lucy could only stare. She stared idiotically, open-mouthed, her face
scarlet. She looked and felt both foolish and frightened. Aunt Dot was
uncanny. If she had discovered, how had she discovered? And what was she
going to do? But had she discovered, or was it just something she
chanced to remember, some engagement Lucy had naturally forgotten, or
perhaps only somebody coming to tea?

She clutched at this straw. 'What is to-morrow?' she stammered, scarlet
with fright and guilt.

And her aunt made herself perfectly clear by replying, 'Your wedding.'

Then Lucy fell on her neck and cried and told her everything, and her
wonderful, unexpected, uncanny, adorable little aunt, instead of being
upset and making her feel too wicked and ungrateful to live, was full of
sympathy and understanding. They sobbed together, sitting on the sofa
locked in each other's arms, but it was a sweet sobbing, for they both
felt at this moment how much they loved each other. Miss Entwhistle
wished she had never had a single critical impatient thought of the man
this darling little child so deeply loved, and Lucy wished she had never
had a single secret from this darling little aunt Everard so blindly
didn't love. Dear, dear little Aunt Dot. Lucy's heart was big with
gratitude and tenderness and pity,--pity because she herself was so
gloriously happy and surrounded by love, and Aunt Dot's life seemed,
compared to hers, so empty, so solitary, and going to be like that till
the end of her days; and Miss Entwhistle's heart was big with yearning
over this lamb of Jim's who was giving herself with such fearlessness,
all lit up by radiant love, into the hands of a strange husband.
Presently, of course, he wouldn't be a strange husband, he would be a
familiar husband; but would he be any the better for that, she wondered?
They sobbed, and kissed, and sobbed again, each keeping half her
thoughts to herself.

This is how it was that Miss Entwhistle walked into the registrar's
office with Lucy next morning and was one of the witnesses of the
marriage.

Wemyss had a very bad moment when he saw her come in. His heart gave a
great thump, such as it had never done in his life before, for he
thought there was to be a hitch and that at the very last minute he was
somehow not going to get his Lucy. Then he looked at Lucy and was
reassured. Her face was like the morning of a perfect day in its
cloudlessness, her Love-in-a-Mist eyes were dewy with tenderness as they
rested on him, and her mouth was twisted up by happiness into the
sweetest, funniest little crooked smile. If only she would take off her
hat, thought Wemyss, bursting with pride, so that the registrar could
see how young she looked with her short hair,--why, perhaps the old boy
might think she was too young to be married and start asking searching
questions! What fun that would be.

He himself produced the effect on Miss Entwhistle, as he stood next to
Lucy being married, of an enormous schoolboy who has just won some
silver cup or other for his House after immense exertions. He had
exactly that glowing face of suppressed triumph and pride; he was red
with delighted achievement.

'Put the ring on your wife's finger,' ordered the registrar when, having
got through the first part of the ceremony, Wemyss, busy beaming down at
Lucy, forgot there was anything more to do. And Lucy stuck up her hand
with all the fingers spread out and stiff, and her face beamed too with
happiness at the words, 'Your wife.'

'"Nothing is here for tears,"' quoted Miss Entwhistle to herself,
watching the blissful absorption with which they were both engaged in
getting the ring successfully over the knuckle of the proper finger. 'He
really _is_ a--a dear. Yes. Of course. But how queer life is. I wonder
what he was doing this day last year, he and that poor other wife of
his.'

When it was over and they were outside on the steps, with the taxi
Wemyss had come in waiting to take them to the station, Miss Entwhistle
realised that here was the place and moment of good-bye, and that not
only could she go no further with Lucy but that from now on she could do
nothing more for her. Except love her. Except listen to her. Ah, she
would always be there to love and listen to her; but happiest of all it
would be for the little thing if she never, from her, were to need
either of those services.

At the last moment she put her hand impulsively on Wemyss's breast and
looked up into his triumphant, flushed face and said, 'Be kind to her.'

'Oh, Aunt Dot!' laughed Lucy, turning to hug her once more.

'Oh, Aunt Dot!' laughed Wemyss, vigorously shaking her hand.

They went down the steps, leaving her standing alone on the top, and she
watched the departing taxi with the two heads bobbing up and down at the
window and the four hands waving good-byes. That taxi window could never
have framed in so much triumph, so much radiance before. Well, well,
thought Aunt Dot, going down in her turn when the last glimpse of them
had disappeared, and walking slowly homeward; and she added, after a
space of further reflection, 'He really _is_ a--a dear.'



XIV


Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard
was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always
sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn't realised how
completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one
minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there
had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any
strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go
to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. The
very sight of their room at the hotels they stayed at, with Wemyss's
suitcases and clothes piled on the chairs, and the table covered with
his brushes and shaving things, for he wouldn't have a dressing-room,
being too natural and wholesome, he explained, to want anything separate
from his own woman--the very sight of this room fatigued her. After a
day of churches, pictures and restaurants--he was a most conscientious
sightseer, besides being greatly interested in his meals--to come back
to this room wasn't rest but further fatigue. Wemyss, who was never
tired and slept wonderfully--it was the soundness of his sleep that kept
her awake, because she wasn't used to hearing sound sleep so
close--would fling himself into the one easy-chair and pull her on to
his knee, and having kissed her a great many times he would ruffle her
hair, and then when it was all on ends like a boy's coming out of a
bath, look at her with the pride of possession and say, 'There's a wife
for a respectable British business man to have! Mrs. Wemyss, aren't you
ashamed of yourself?' And then there would be more kissing,--jovial,
gluttonous kisses, that made her skin rough and chapped.

'Baby,' she would say, feebly struggling, and smiling a little wearily.

Yes, he was a baby, a dear, high-spirited baby, but a baby now at very
close quarters and one that went on all the time. You couldn't put him
in a cot and give him a bottle and say, 'There now,' and then sit down
quietly to a little sewing; you didn't have Sundays out; you were never,
day or night, an instant off duty. Lucy couldn't count the number of
times a day she had to answer the question, 'Who's my own little wife?'
At first she answered it with laughing ecstasy, running into his
outstretched arms, but very soon that fatal sleepiness set in and
remained with her for the whole of her honeymoon, and she really felt
too tired sometimes to get the ecstasy she quickly got to know was
expected of her into her voice. She loved him, she was indeed his own
little wife, but constantly to answer this and questions like it
satisfactorily was a great exertion. Yet if there was a shadow of
hesitation before she answered, a hair's-breadth of delay owing to her
thoughts having momentarily wandered, Wemyss was upset, and she had to
spend quite a long time reassuring him with the fondest whispers and
caresses. Her thoughts mustn't wander, she had discovered; her thoughts
were to be his as well as all the rest of her. Was ever a girl so much
loved? she asked herself, astonished and proud; but, on the other hand,
she was dreadfully sleepy.

Any thinking she did had to be done at night, when she lay awake because
of the immense emphasis with which Wemyss slept, and she hadn't been
married a week before she was reflecting what a bad arrangement it was,
the way ecstasy seemed to have no staying power. Also it oughtn't to
begin, she considered, at its topmost height and accordingly not be able
to move except downwards. If one could only start modestly in marriage
with very little of it and work steadily upwards, taking one's time,
knowing there was more and more to come, it would be much better she
thought. No doubt it would go on longer if one slept better and hadn't,
consequently, got headaches. Everard's ecstasy went on. Perhaps by
ecstasy she really meant high spirits, and Everard was beside himself
with high spirits.

Wemyss was indeed the typical bridegroom of the Psalms, issuing forth
rejoicing from his chamber. Lucy wished she could issue forth from it
rejoicing too. She was vexed with herself for being so stupidly sleepy,
for not being able to get used to the noise beside her at night and go
to sleep as naturally as she did in Eaton Terrace, in spite of the horns
of taxis. It wasn't fair to Everard, she felt, not to find a wife in the
morning matching him in spirits. Perhaps, however, this was a condition
peculiar to honeymoons, and marriage, once the honeymoon was over, would
be a more tranquil state. Things would settle down when they were back
in England, to a different, more separated life in which there would be
time to rest, time to think; time to remember, while he was away at his
office, how deeply she loved him. And surely she would learn to sleep;
and once she slept properly she would be able to answer his loving
questions throughout the day with more real _élan_.

But,--there in England waiting for her, inevitable, no longer to be put
off or avoided, was The Willows. Whenever her thoughts reached that
house they gave a little jump and tried to slink away. She was ashamed
of herself, it was ridiculous, and Everard's attitude was plainly the
sensible one, and if he could adopt it surely she, who hadn't gone
through that terrible afternoon last July, could; yet she failed to see
herself in The Willows, she failed altogether to imagine it. How, for
instance, was she going to sit on that terrace,--'We always have tea in
fine weather on the terrace,' Wemyss had casually remarked, apparently
quite untouched by the least memory--how was she going to have tea on
the very flags perhaps where.... Her thoughts slunk away; but not before
one of them had sent a curdling whisper through her mind, '_The tea
would taste of blood_.'

Well, this was sleeplessness. She never in her life had had that sort of
absurd thought. It was just that she didn't sleep, and so her brain was
relaxed and let the reins of her thinking go slack. The day her father
died, it's true, when it began to be evening and she was afraid of the
night alone with him in his mysterious indifference, she had begun
thinking absurdly, but Everard had come and saved her. He could save her
from this too if she could tell him; only she couldn't tell him. How
could she spoil his joy in his home? It was the thing he loved next best
to her.

As the honeymoon went on and Wemyss's ecstasies a little subsided, as he
began to tire of so many trains--after Paris they did the châteaux
country--and hotels and waiters and taxis and restaurants, and the
cooking which he had at first enjoyed now only increased his longing at
every meal for a plain English steak and boiled potatoes, he talked more
and more of The Willows. With almost the same eagerness as that which
had so much enchanted and moved her before their marriage when he talked
of their wedding day, he now talked of The Willows and the day when he
would show it to her. He counted the days now to that day. The 4th of
April; his birthday; on that happy day he would lead his little wife
into the home he loved. How could she, when he talked like that, do
anything but pretend enthusiasm and looking forward? He had apparently
entirely forgotten what she had told him about her reluctance to go
there at Christmas. She was astonished that, when the first bliss of
being married to her had worn off and his thoughts were free for this
other thing he so much loved, his home, he didn't approach it with more
care for what he must know was her feeling about it. She was still more
astonished when she realised that he had entirely forgotten her feeling
about it. It would be, she felt, impossible to shadow his happiness at
the prospect of showing her his home by any reminder of her reluctance.
Besides, she was certainly going to have to live at The Willows, so what
was the use of talking?

'I suppose,' she did say hesitatingly one day when he was describing it
to her for the hundredth time, for it was his habit to describe the same
thing often, 'you've changed your room----?'

They were sitting at the moment, resting after the climb up, on one of
the terraces of the Château of Amboise, with a view across the Loire of
an immense horizon, and Wemyss had been comparing it, to its
disadvantage, when he recovered his breath, with the view from his
bedroom window at The Willows. It wasn't very nice weather, and they
both were cold and tired, and it was still only eleven o'clock in the
morning.

'Change my room? What room?' he asked.

'Your--the room you and--the room you slept in.'

'My bedroom? I should think not. It's the best room in the house. Why do
you think I've changed it?' And he looked at her with a surprised face.

'Oh, I don't know,' said Lucy, taking refuge in stroking his hand. 'I
only thought----'

An inkling of what was in her mind penetrated into his, and his voice
went grave.

'You mustn't think,' he said. 'You mustn't be morbid. Now Lucy, I can't
have that. It will spoil everything if you let yourself be morbid. And
you promised me before our marriage you wouldn't be. Have you
forgotten?'

He turned to her and took her face in both his hands and searched her
eyes with his own very solemn ones, while the woman who was conducting
them over the castle went to the low parapet, and stood with her back to
them studying the view and yawning.

'Oh, Everard--of course I haven't forgotten. I've not forgotten anything
I promised you, and never will. But--have I got to go into that bedroom
too?'

He was really astonished. 'Have you got to go into that bedroom too?' he
repeated, staring at the face enclosed in his two big hands. It looked
extraordinarily pretty like that, like a small flower in its delicate
whiteness next to his discoloured, middle-aged hands, and her mouth
since her marriage seemed to have become an even more vivid red than it
used to be, and her eyes were young enough to be made more beautiful
instead of less by the languor of want of sleep. 'Well, I should think
so. Aren't you my wife?'

'Yes,' said Lucy. 'But----'

'Now, Lucy, I'll have no buts,' he said, with his most serious air,
kissing her on the cheek, she had discovered that just that kind of kiss
was a rebuke. 'Those buts of yours butt in----'

He stopped, struck by what he had said.

'I think that was rather amusing--don't you?' he asked, suddenly
smiling.

'Oh yes--very,' said Lucy eagerly, smiling too, delighted that he should
switch off from solemnity.

He kissed her again,--this time a real kiss, on her funny, charming
mouth.

'I suppose you'll admit,' he said, laughing and squeezing up her face
into a quaint crumpled shape, 'that either you're my wife or not my
wife, and that if you're my wife----'

'Oh, I'm _that_ all right,' laughed Lucy.

'Then you share my room. None of these damned new-fangled notions for
me, young woman.'

'Oh, but I didn't mean----'

'What? Another but?' he exclaimed, pouncing down on to her mouth and
stopping it with an enormous kiss.

'_Monsieur et Madame se refroidiront_,' said the woman, turning round
and drawing her shawl closer over her chest as a gust of chilly wind
swept over the terrace.

They were honeymooners, poor creatures, and therefore one had patience;
but even honeymooners oughtn't to wish to embrace in a cold wind on an
exposed terrace of a château round which they were being conducted by a
woman who was in a hurry to return to the preparation of her Sunday
dinner. For such purposes hotels were provided, and the shelter of a
comfortable warm room. She had supposed them to be _père et fille_ when
first she admitted them, but was soon aware of their real relationship.
'_Il doit être bien riche_,' had been her conclusion.

'Come along, come along,' said Wemyss, getting up quickly, for he too
felt the gust of cold wind. 'Let's finish the château or we'll be late
for lunch. I wish they hadn't preserved so many of these places--one
would have been quite enough to show us the sort of thing.'

'But we needn't go and look at them all,' said Lucy.

'Oh yes we must. We've arranged to.'

'But Everard----' began Lucy, following after him as he followed after
the conductress, who had a way of darting out of sight round corners.

'This woman's like a lizard,' panted Wemyss, arriving round a corner
only to see her disappear through an arch. 'Won't we be happy when it's
time to go back to England and not have to see any more sights.'

'But why don't we go back now, if you feel like it?' asked Lucy,
trotting after him as he on his big legs pursued the retreating
conductress, and anxious to show him, by eagerness to go sooner to The
Willows than was arranged, that she wasn't being morbid.

'Why, you know we can't leave before the 3rd of April,' said Wemyss,
over his shoulder. 'It's all settled.'

'But can't it be unsettled?'

'What, and upset all the plans, and arrive home before my birthday?' He
stopped and turned round to stare at her. 'Really, my dear----' he said.

She had discovered that my dear was a term of rebuke.

'Oh yes--of course,' she said hastily, 'I forgot about your birthday.'

At that Wemyss stared at her harder than ever; incredulously, in fact.
Forgot about his birthday? _Lucy_ had forgotten? If it had been Vera,
now--but Lucy? He was deeply hurt. He was so much hurt that he stood
quite still, and the conductress was obliged, on discovering that she
was no longer being followed, to wait once more for the honeymooners;
which she did, clutching her shawl round her abundant French chest and
shivering.

What had she said, Lucy hurriedly asked herself, nipping over her last
words in her mind, for she had learned by now what he looked like when
he was hurt. Oh yes,--the birthday. How stupid of her. But it was
because birthdays in her family were so unimportant, and nobody had
minded whether they were remembered or not.

'I didn't mean that,' she said earnestly, laying her hand on his breast.
'Of course I hadn't forgotten anything so precious. It only had--well,
you know what even the most wonderful things do sometimes--it--it had
escaped my memory.'

'Lucy! Escaped your memory? The day to which you owe your husband?'

Wemyss said this with such an exaggerated solemnity, such an immense
pomposity, that she thought he was in fun and hadn't really minded about
the birthday at all; and, eager to meet every mood of his, she laughed.
Relieved, she was so unfortunate as to laugh merrily.

To her consternation, after a moment's further stare he turned his back
on her without a word and walked on.

Then she realised what she had done, that she had laughed--oh, how
dreadful!--in the wrong place, and she ran after him and put her arm
through his, and tried to lay her cheek against his sleeve, which was
difficult because of the way their paces didn't match and also because
he took no notice of her, and said, 'Baby--baby--were his dear feelings
hurt, then?' and coaxed him.

But he wouldn't be coaxed. She had wounded him too deeply,--laughing, he
said to himself, at what was to him the most sacred thing in life, the
fact that he was her husband, that she was his wife.

'Oh, Everard,' she murmured at last, withdrawing her arm, giving up,
'don't spoil our day.'

Spoil their day? He? That finished it.

He didn't speak to her again till night. Then, in bed, after she had
cried bitterly for a long while, because she couldn't make out what
really had happened, and she loved him so much, and wouldn't hurt him
for the world, and was heart-broken because she had, and anyhow was
tired out, he at last turned to her and took her to his arms again and
forgave her.

'I can't live,' sobbed Lucy, 'I can't live--if you don't go on loving
me--if we don't understand----'

'My little Love,' said Wemyss, melted by the way her small body was
shaking in his arms, and rather frightened, too, at the excess of her
woe. 'My little Love don't. You mustn't. Your Everard loves you, and you
mustn't give way like this. You'll be ill. Think how miserable you'd
make him then.'

And in the dark he kissed away her tears, and held her close till her
sobbing quieted down; and presently, held close like that, his kisses
shutting her smarting eyes, she now the baby comforted and reassured,
and he the soothing nurse, she fell asleep, and for the first time since
her marriage slept all night.



XV


Early in their engagement Wemyss had expounded his theory to Lucy that
there should be the most perfect frankness between lovers, while as for
husband and wife there oughtn't to be a corner anywhere about either of
them, mind, body, or soul, which couldn't be revealed to the other one.

'You can talk about everything to your Everard,' he assured her. 'Tell
him your innermost thoughts, whatever they may be. You need no more be
ashamed of telling him than of thinking them by yourself. He _is_ you.
You and he are one in mind and soul now, and when he is your husband you
and he will become perfect and complete by being one in body as well.
Everard--Lucy. Lucy--Everard. We shan't know where one ends and the
other begins. That, little Love, is real marriage. What do you think of
it?'

Lucy thought so highly of it that she had no words with which to express
her admiration, and fell to kissing him instead. What ideal happiness,
to be for ever removed from the fear of loneliness by the simple
expedient of being doubled; and who so happy as herself to have found
the exactly right person for this doubling, one she could so perfectly
agree with and understand? She felt quite sorry she had nothing in her
mind in the way of thoughts she was ashamed of to tell him then and
there, but there wasn't a doubt, there wasn't a shred of anything a
little wrong, not even an unworthy suspicion. Her mind was a chalice
filled only with love, and so clear and bright was the love that even at
the bottom, when she stirred it up to look, there wasn't a trace of
sediment.

But marriage--or was it sleeplessness?--completely changed this, and
there were perfect crowds of thoughts in her mind that she was
thoroughly ashamed of. Remembering his words, and whole-heartedly
agreeing that to be able to tell each other everything, to have no
concealments, was real marriage, the day after her wedding she first of
all reminded him of what he had said, then plunged bravely into the
announcement that she'd got a thought she was ashamed of.

Wemyss pricked up his ears, thinking it was something interesting to do
with sex, and waited with an amused, inquisitive smile. But Lucy in such
matters was content to follow him, aware of her want of experience and
of the abundance of his, and the thought that was worrying her only had
to do with a waiter. A waiter, if you please.

Wemyss's smile died away. He had had occasion to reprimand this waiter
at lunch for gross negligence, and here was Lucy alleging he had done so
without any reason that she could see, and anyhow roughly. Would he
remove the feeling of discomfort she had at being forced to think her
own heart's beloved, the kindest and gentlest of men, hadn't been kind
and gentle but unjust, by explaining?

Well, that was at the very beginning. She soon learned that a doubt in
her mind was better kept there. If she brought it out to air it and
dispel it by talking it over with him, all that happened was that he was
hurt, and when he was hurt she instantly became perfectly miserable.
Seeing, then, that this happened about small things, how impossible it
was to talk with him of big things; of, especially, her immense doubt in
regard to The Willows. For a long while she was sure he was bearing her
feeling in mind, since it couldn't have changed since Christmas, and
that when she arrived there she would find that he had had everything
altered and all traces of Vera's life there removed. Then, when he began
to talk about The Willows, she found that such an idea as alterations
hadn't entered his head. She was to sleep in the very room that had been
his and Vera's, in the very bed. And positively, so far was it from true
that she could tell him every thought and talk everything over with him,
when she discovered this she wasn't able to say more than that
hesitating remark on the château terrace at Amboise about supposing he
was going to change his bedroom.

Yet The Willows haunted her, and what a comfort it would have been to
tell him all she felt and let him help her to get rid of her growing
obsession by laughing at her. What a comfort if, even if he had thought
her too silly and morbid to be laughed at, he had indulged her and
consented to alter those rooms. But one learns a lot on a honeymoon,
Lucy reflected, and one of the things she had learned was that Wemyss's
mind was always made up. There seemed to be no moment when it was in a
condition of becoming, and she might have slipped in a suggestion or
laid a wish before him; his plans were sprung upon her full fledged, and
they were unalterable. Sometimes he said, 'Would you like----?' and if
she didn't like, and answered truthfully, as she answered at first
before she learned not to, there was trouble. Silent trouble. A retiring
of Wemyss into a hurt aloofness, for his question was only decorative,
and his little Love should instinctively, he considered, like what he
liked; and there outside this aloofness, after efforts to get at him
with fond and anxious questions, she sat like a beggar in patient
distress, waiting for him to emerge and be kind to her.

Of course as far as the minor wishes and preferences of every day went
it was all quite easy, once she had grasped the right answer to the
question, 'Would you like?' She instantly did like. 'Oh yes--_very_
much!' she hastened to assure him; and then his face continued content
and happy instead of clouding with aggrievement. But about the big
things it wasn't easy, because of the difficulty of getting the right
flavour of enthusiasm into her voice, and if she didn't get it in he
would put his finger under her chin and turn her to the light and repeat
the question in a solemn voice,--precursor, she had learned, of the
beginning of the cloud on his face.

How difficult it was sometimes. When he said to her, 'You'll like the
view from your sitting-room at The Willows,' she naturally wanted to cry
out that she wouldn't, and ask him how he could suppose she would like
what was to her a view for ever associated with death? Why shouldn't she
be able to cry out naturally if she wanted to, to talk to him frankly,
to get his help to cure herself of what was so ridiculous by laughing at
it with him? She couldn't laugh all alone, though she was always trying
to; with him she could have, and so have become quite sensible. For he
was so much bigger than she was, so wonderful in the way he had
triumphed over diseased thinking, and his wholesomeness would spread
over her too, a purging, disinfecting influence, if only he would let
her talk, if only he would help her to laugh. Instead, she found herself
hurriedly saying in a small, anxious voice, 'Oh yes--_very_ much!'

'Is it possible,' she thought, 'that I am abject?'

Yes, she was extremely abject, she reflected, lying awake at night
considering her behaviour during the day. Love had made her so. Love did
make one abject, for it was full of fear of hurting the beloved. The
assertion of the Scriptures that perfect love casteth out fear only
showed, seeing that her love for Everard was certainly perfect, how
little the Scriptures really knew what they were talking about.

Well, if she couldn't tell him the things she was feeling, why couldn't
she get rid of the sorts of feelings she couldn't tell him, and just be
wholesome? Why couldn't she be at least as wholesome about going to that
house as Everard? If anybody was justified in shrinking from The Willows
it was Everard, not herself. Sometimes Lucy would be sure that deep in
his character there was a wonderful store of simple courage. He didn't
speak of Vera's death, naturally he didn't wish to speak of that awful
afternoon, but how often he must think of it, hiding his thoughts even
from her, bearing them altogether alone. Sometimes she was sure of this,
and sometimes she was equally sure of the very opposite. From the way he
looked, the way he spoke, from those tiny indications that one somehow
has noticed without knowing that one has noticed and that are so far
more revealing and conclusive than any words, she sometimes was sure he
really had forgotten. But this was too incredible. She couldn't believe
it. What had perhaps happened, she thought, was that in self-defence,
for the preservation of his peace, he had made up his mind never to
think of Vera. Only by banishing her altogether from his mind would he
be safe. Yet that couldn't be true either, for several times on the
honeymoon he had begun talking of her, of things she had said, of things
she had liked, and it was she, Lucy, who stopped him. She shrank from
hearing anything about Vera. She especially shrank from hearing her
mentioned casually. She was ready to brace herself to talk about her if
it was to be a serious talk, because she wanted to help and comfort him
whenever the remembrance of her death arose to torment him, but she
couldn't bear to hear her mentioned casually. In a way she admired this
casualness, because it was a proof of the supreme wholesomeness Everard
had attained to by sheer courageous determination, but even so she
couldn't help thinking that she would have preferred a little less of
just this kind of wholesomeness in her beloved. She might be too morbid,
but wasn't it possible to be too wholesome? Anyhow she shrank from the
intrusion of Vera into her honeymoon. That, at least, ought to be kept
free from her. Later on at The Willows....

Lucy fought and fought against it, but always at the back of her mind
was the thought, not looked at, slunk away from, but nevertheless fixed,
that there at The Willows, waiting for her, was Vera.



XVI


Those who go to Strorley, and cross the bridge to the other side of the
river, have only to follow the towpath for a little to come to The
Willows. It can also be reached by road, through a white gate down a
lane that grows more and more willowy as it gets nearer the river and
the house, but is quite passable for carts and even for cars, except
when there are floods. When there are floods this lane disappears, and
when the floods have subsided it is black and oozing for a long time
afterwards, with clouds of tiny flies dancing about in it if the weather
is at all warm, and the shoes of those who walk stick in it and come
off, and those who drive, especially if they drive a car, have trouble.
But all is well once a second white gate is reached, on the other side
of which is a gravel sweep, a variety of handsome shrubs, nicely kept
lawns, and The Willows. There are no big trees in the garden of The
Willows, because it was built in the middle of meadows where there
weren't any, but all round the iron railings of the square garden--the
house being the centre of the square--and concealing the wire netting
which keeps the pasturing cows from thrusting their heads through and
eating the shrubs, is a fringe of willows. Hence its name.

'A house,' said Wemyss, explaining its name to Lucy on the morning of
their arrival, 'should always be named after whatever most insistently
catches the eye.'

'Then oughtn't it to have been called The Cows?' asked Lucy; for the
meadows round were strewn thickly as far as she could see with recumbent
cows, and they caught her eye much more than the tossing bare willow
branches.

'No,' said Wemyss, annoyed. 'It ought not have been called The Cows.'

'No--of course I didn't mean that,' she said hastily.

Lucy was nervous, and said what first came into her head, and had been
saying things of this nature the whole journey down. She didn't want to,
she knew he didn't like it, but she couldn't stop.

They had just arrived, and were standing on the front steps while the
servants unloaded the fly that had brought them from the station, and
Wemyss was pointing out what he wished her to look at and admire from
that raised-up place before taking her indoors. Lucy was glad of any
excuse that delayed going indoors, that kept her on the west side of the
house, furthest away from the terrace and the library window. Indoors
would be the rooms, the unaltered rooms, the library past whose
window..., the sitting-room at the top of the house out of whose
window..., the bedroom she was going to sleep in with the very bed....
It was too miserably absurd, too unbalanced of her for anything but
shame and self-contempt, how she couldn't get away from the feeling that
indoors waiting for her would be Vera.

It was a grey, windy morning, with low clouds scurrying across the
meadows. The house was raised well above flood level, and standing on
the top step she could see how far the meadows stretched beyond the
swaying willow hedge. Grey sky, grey water, green fields,--it was all
grey and green except the house, which was red brick with handsome stone
facings, and made, in its exposed position unhidden by any trees, a
great splotch of vivid red in the landscape.

'Like blood,' said Lucy to herself; and was immediately ashamed.

'Oh, how bracing!' she cried, spreading out her arms and letting the
wind blow her serge wrap out behind her like a flag. It whipped her
skirt round her body, showing its slender pretty lines, and the
parlourmaid, going in and out with the luggage, looked curiously at this
small juvenile new mistress. 'Oh, I love this wind--don't take me
indoors yet----'

Wemyss was pleased that she should like the wind, for was it not by the
time it reached his house part, too, of his property? His face, which
had clouded a little because of The Cows, cleared again.

But she didn't really like the wind at all, she never had liked anything
that blustered and was cold, and if she hadn't been nervous the last
thing she would have done was to stand there letting it blow her to
pieces.

'And what a lot of laurels!' she exclaimed, holding on her hat with one
hand and with the other pointing to a corner filled with these shrubs.

'Yes. I'll take you round the garden after lunch,' said Wemyss. 'We'll
go in now.'

'And--and laurustinus. I love laurustinus----'

'Yes. Vera planted that. It has done very well. Come in now----'

'And--look, what are those bare things without any leaves yet?'

'I'll show you everything after lunch, Lucy. Come in----' And he put his
arm about her shoulders, and urged her through the door the maid was
holding open with difficulty because of the wind.

There she was, then, actually inside The Willows. The door was shut
behind her. She looked about her shrinkingly.

They were in a roomy place with a staircase in it.

'The hall,' said Wemyss, standing still, his arm round her.

'Yes,' said Lucy.

'Oak,' said Wemyss.

'Yes,' said Lucy.

He gazed round him with a sigh of satisfaction at having got back to it.

'All oak,' he said. 'You'll find nothing gimcrack about _my_ house,
little Love. Where are those flowers?' he added, turning sharply to the
parlourmaid. 'I don't see my yellow flowers.'

'They're in the dining-room, sir,' said the parlourmaid.

'Why aren't they where I could see them the first thing?'

'I understood the orders were they were always to be on the
breakfast-table, sir.'

'Breakfast-table! When there isn't any breakfast?'

'I understood----'

'I'm not interested in what you understood.'

Lucy here nervously interrupted, for Everard sounded suddenly very
angry, by exclaiming, 'Antlers!' and waving her unpinned-down arm in the
direction of the----

'Yes,' said Wemyss, his attention called off the parlourmaid, gazing up
at his walls with pride.

'What a lot,' said Lucy.

'Aren't there. I always said I'd have a hall with antlers in it, and
I've got it.' He hugged her close to his side. 'And I've got you too,'
he said. 'I always get what I'm determined to get.'

'Did you shoot them all yourself?' asked Lucy, thinking the parlourmaid
would take the opportunity to disappear, and a little surprised that she
continued to stand there.

'What? The beasts they belonged to? Not I. If you want antlers the
simple way is to go and buy them. Then you get them all at once, and not
gradually. The hall was ready for them all at once, not gradually. I got
these at Whiteley's. Kiss me.'

This sudden end to his remarks startled Lucy, and she repeated in her
surprise--for there still stood the parlourmaid 'Kiss you?'

'I haven't had my birthday kiss yet.'

'Why, the very first thing when you woke up----'

'Not my real birthday kiss in my own home.'

She looked at the parlourmaid, who was quite frankly looking at her.
Well, if the parlourmaid didn't mind, and Everard didn't mind, why
should she mind?

She lifted her face and kissed him; but she didn't like kissing him or
being kissed in public. What was the point of it? Kissing Everard was a
great delight to her. A mixture of all sorts of wonderful sensations,
and she loved to do it in different ways, tenderly, passionately,
lingeringly, dreamily, amusingly, solemnly; each kind in turn, or in
varied combinations. But among her varied combinations there was nothing
that included a parlourmaid. Consequently her kiss was of the sort that
was to be expected, perfunctory and brief, whereupon Wemyss said,
'Lucy----' in his hurt voice.

She started.

'Oh Everard--what is it?' she asked nervously.

That particular one of his voices always by now made her start, for it
always took her by surprise. Pick her way as carefully as she might
among his feelings there were always some, apparently, that she hadn't
dreamed were there and that she accordingly knocked against. How
dreadful if she had hurt him the very first thing on getting into The
Willows! And on his birthday too. From the moment he woke that morning,
all the way down in the train, all the way in the fly from the station,
she had been unremittingly engaged in avoiding hurting him; an activity
made extra difficult by the unfortunate way her nervousness about the
house at the journey's end impelled her to say the kinds of things she
least wanted to. Irreverent things; such as the silly remark on his
house's name. She had got on much better the evening before at the house
in Lancaster Gate where they had slept, because gloomy as it was it
anyhow wasn't The Willows. Also there was no trace in it that she could
see of such a thing as a woman ever having lived in it. It was a man's
house; the house of a man who has no time for pictures, or interesting
books and furniture. It was like a club and an office mixed up together,
with capacious leather chairs and solid tables and Turkey carpets and
reference books. She found it quite impossible to imagine Vera, or any
other woman, in that house. Either Vera had spent most of her time at
The Willows, or every trace of her had been very carefully removed.
Therefore Lucy, helped besides by extreme fatigue, for she had been
sea-sick all the way from Dieppe to Newhaven, Wemyss having crossed that
way because he was fond of the sea, had positively been unable to think
of Vera in those surroundings and had dropped off to sleep directly she
got there and had slept all night; and of course being asleep she
naturally hadn't said anything she oughtn't to have said, so that her
first appearance in Lancaster Gate was a success; and when she woke next
morning, and saw Wemyss's face in such unclouded tranquillity next to
hers as he still slept, she lay gazing at it with her heart brimming
with tender love and vowed that his birthday should be as unclouded
throughout as his dear face was at that moment. She adored him. He was
her very life. She wanted nothing in the world except for him to be
happy. She would watch every word. She really must see to it that on
this day of all days no word should escape her before it had been turned
round in her head at least three times, and considered with the utmost
care. Such were her resolutions in the morning; and here she was not
only saying the wrong things but doing them. It was because she hadn't
expected to be told to kiss him in the presence of a parlourmaid. She
was always being tripped up by the unexpected. She ought by now to have
learned better. How unfortunate.

'Oh Everard--what is it?' she asked nervously; but she knew before he
could answer, and throwing her objections to public caresses to the
winds, for anything was better than that he should be hurt at just that
moment, she put up her free arm and drew his head down and kissed him
again,--lingeringly this time, a kiss of tender, appealing love. What
must it be like, she thought while she kissed him and her heart yearned
over him, to be so fearfully sensitive. It made things difficult for
her, but how much, much more difficult for him. And how wonderful the
way his sensitiveness had developed since marriage. There had been no
sign of it before.

Implicit in her kiss was an appeal not to let anything she said or did
spoil his birthday, to forgive her, to understand. And at the back of
her mind, quite uncontrollable, quite unauthorised, ran beneath these
other thoughts this thought: 'I am certainly abject.'

This time he was quickly placated because of his excitement at getting
home. 'Nobody can hurt me as you can,' was all he said.

'Oh but as though I ever, ever mean to,' she breathed, her arm round his
neck.

Meanwhile the parlourmaid looked on.

'Why doesn't she go?' whispered Lucy, making the most of having got his
ear.

'Certainly not,' said Wemyss out loud, raising his head. 'I might want
her. Do you like the hall, little Love?'

'_Very_ much,' she said, loosing him.

'Don't you think it's a very fine staircase?'

'_Very_ fine,' she said.

He gazed about him with pride, standing in the middle of the Turkey
carpet holding her close to his side.

'Now look at the window,' he said, turning her round when she had had
time to absorb the staircase. 'Look--isn't it a jolly window? No
nonsense about that window. You can really see out of it, and it really
lets in light. Vera'--she winced--'tried to stuff it all up with
curtains. She said she wanted colour, or something. Having got a
beautiful garden to look out at, what does she try to do but shut most
of it out again by putting up curtains.'

The attempt had evidently not succeeded, for the window, which was as
big as a window in the waiting-room of a London terminus, had nothing to
interfere with it but the hanging cord of a drawn-up brown holland
blind. Through it Lucy could see the whole half of the garden on the
right side of the front door with the tossing willow hedge, the meadows,
and the cows. The leafless branches of some creeper beat against it and
made a loud irregular tapping in the pauses of Wemyss's observations.

'Plate glass,' he said.

'Yes,' said Lucy; and something in his voice made her add in a tone of
admiration, 'Fancy.'

Looking at the window they had their backs to the stairs. Suddenly she
heard footsteps coming down them from the landing above.

'Who's that?' she said quickly, with a little gasp, before she could
think, before she could stop, not turning her head, her eyes staring at
the window.

'Who's what?' asked Wemyss. 'You do think it's a jolly window, don't
you, little Love?'

The footsteps on the stairs stopped, and a gong she had noticed at the
angle of the turn was sounded. Her body, which had shrunk together,
relaxed. What a fool she was.

'Lunch,' said Wemyss. 'Come along--but isn't it a jolly window, little
Love?'

'_Very_ jolly.'

He turned her round to march her off to the dining-room, while the
housemaid, who had come down from the landing, continued to beat the
gong, though there they were obeying it under her very nose.

'Don't you think that's a good place to have a gong?' he asked, raising
his voice because the gong, which had begun quietly, was getting rapidly
louder. 'Then when you're upstairs in your sitting-room you'll hear it
just as distinctly as if you were downstairs. Vera----'

But what he was going to say about Vera was drowned this time in the
increasing fury of the gong.

'Why doesn't she leave off?' Lucy tried to call out to him, straining
her voice to its utmost, for the maid was very good at the gong and was
now extracting the dreadfullest din out of it.

'Eh?' shouted Wemyss.

In the dining-room, whither they were preceded by the parlourmaid, who
at last had left off standing still and had opened the door for them, as
Lucy could hear the gong continuing to be beaten though muffled now by
doors and distance, she again said, 'Why doesn't she leave off?'

Wemyss took out his watch.

'She will in another fifty seconds,' he said.

Lucy's mouth and eyebrows became all inquiry.

'It is beaten for exactly two and a half minutes before every meal,' he
explained.

'Oh?' said Lucy. 'Even when we're visibly collected?'

'She doesn't know that.'

'But she saw us.'

'But she doesn't know it officially.'

'Oh,' said Lucy.

'I had to make that rule,' said Wemyss, arranging his knives and forks
more accurately beside his plate, 'because they would leave off beating
it almost as soon as they'd begun, and then Vera was late and her excuse
was that she hadn't heard. For a time after that I used to have it
beaten all up the stairs right to the door of her sitting-room. Isn't it
a fine gong? Listen----' And he raised his hand.

'_Very_ fine,' said Lucy, who was thoroughly convinced there wasn't a
finer, more robust gong in existence.

'There. Time's up,' he said, as three great strokes were followed by a
blessed silence.

He pulled out his watch again. 'Let's see. Yes--to the tick. You
wouldn't believe the trouble I had to get them to keep time.'

'It's wonderful,' said Lucy.

The dining-room was a narrow room full of a table. It had a window
facing west and a window facing north, and in spite of the uninterrupted
expanses of plate glass was a bleak, dark room. But then the weather was
bleak and dark, and one saw such a lot of it out of the two big windows
as one sat at the long table and watched the rolling clouds blowing
straight towards one from the north-west; for Lucy's place was facing
the north window, on Wemyss's left hand. Wemyss sat at the end of the
table facing the west window. The table was so long that if Lucy had
sat in the usual seat of wives, opposite her husband, communication
would have been difficult,--indeed, as she remarked, she would have
disappeared below the dip of the horizon.

'I like a long table,' said Wemyss to this. 'It looks so hospitable.'

'Yes,' said Lucy a little doubtfully, but willing to admit that its
length at least showed a readiness for hospitality. 'I suppose it does.
Or it would if there were people all round it.'

'People? You don't mean to say you want people already?'

'Good heavens no,' said Lucy hastily.' Of course I don't. Why, of
course, Everard, I didn't mean that,' she added, laying her hand on his
and smiling at him so as to dispel the gathering cloud on his face; and
once more she flung all thoughts of the parlourmaid to the winds. 'You
know I don't want a soul in the world but you.'

'Well, that's what I thought,' said Wemyss, mollified. 'I know all I
want is you.'

(Was this same parlourmaid here in Vera's time? Lucy asked herself very
privately and unconsciously and beneath the concerned attentiveness she
was concentrating on Wemyss.)

'What lovely kingcups!' she said aloud.

'Oh yes, there they are--I hadn't noticed them. Yes, aren't they?
They're my birthday flowers.' And he repeated his formula: 'It's my
birthday and Spring's.'

But Lucy, of course, didn't know the proper ritual, it being her first
experience of one of Wemyss's birthdays, besides having wished him his
many happy returns hours ago when he first opened his eyes and found
hers gazing at him with love; so all she did was to make the natural but
unfortunate remark that surely Spring began on the 21st of March,--or
was it the 25th? No, that was Christmas Day--no, she didn't mean
that----

'You're always saying things and then saying you didn't mean them,'
interrupted Wemyss, vexed, for he thought that Lucy of all people should
have recognised the allegorical nature of his formula. If it had been
Vera, now,--but even Vera had managed to understand that much. 'I wish
you would begin with what you do mean, it would be so much simpler.
What, pray, _do_ you mean now?'

'I can't think,' said Lucy timidly, for she had offended him again, and
this time she couldn't even remotely imagine how.



XVII


He got over it, however. There was a particularly well-made soufflé, and
this helped. Also Lucy kept on looking at him very tenderly, and it was
the first time she had sat at his table in his beloved home, realising
the dreams of months that she should sit just there with him, his little
bobbed-haired Love, and gradually therefore he recovered and smiled at
her again.

But what power she had to hurt him, thought Wemyss; it was so great
because his love for her was so great. She should be very careful how
she wielded it. Her Everard was made very sensitive by his love.

He gazed at her solemnly, thinking this, while the plates were being
changed.

'What is it, Everard?' Lucy asked anxiously.

'I'm only thinking that I love you,' he said, laying his hand on hers.

She flushed with pleasure, and her face grew instantly happy. 'My
Everard,' she murmured, gazing back at him, forgetful in her pleasure of
the parlourmaid. How dear he was. How silly she was to be so much
distressed when he was offended. At the core he was so sound and simple.
At the core he was utterly her own dear lover. The rest was mere
incident, merest indifferent detail.

'We'll have coffee in the library,' he said to the parlourmaid, getting
up when he had finished his lunch and walking to the door. 'Come along,
little Love,' he called over his shoulder.

The library....

'Can't we--don't we--have coffee in the hall?' asked Lucy, getting up
slowly.

'No,' said Wemyss, who had paused before an enlarged photograph that
hung on the wall between the two windows, enlarged to life size.

He examined it a moment, and then drew his finger obliquely across the
glass from top to bottom. It then became evident that the picture needed
dusting.

'Look,' he said to the parlourmaid, pointing.

The parlourmaid looked.

'I notice you don't say anything,' he said to her after a silence in
which she continued to look, and Lucy, taken aback again, stood
uncertain by the chair she had got up from. 'I don't wonder. There's
nothing you can possibly say to excuse such carelessness.'

'Lizzie----' began the parlourmaid.

'Don't put it on to Lizzie.'

The parlourmaid ceased putting it on to Lizzie and was dumb.

'Come along, little Love,' said Wemyss, turning to Lucy and holding out
his hand. 'It makes one pretty sick, doesn't it, to see that not even
one's own father gets dusted.'

'Is that your father?' asked Lucy, hurrying to his side and offering no
opinion about dusting.

It could have been no one else's. It was Wemyss grown very enormous,
Wemyss grown very old, Wemyss displeased. The photograph had been so
arranged that wherever you moved to in the room Wemyss's father watched
you doing it. He had been watching Lucy from between those two windows
all through her first lunch, and must, flashed through Lucy's brain,
have watched Vera like that all through her last one.

'How long has he been there?' she asked, looking up into Wemyss's
father's displeased eyes which looked straight back into hers.

'Been there?' repeated Wemyss, drawing her away for he wanted his
coffee. 'How can I remember? Ever since I've lived here, I should think.
He died five years ago. He was a wonderful old man, nearly ninety. He
used to stay here a lot.'

Opposite this picture hung another, next to the door that led into the
hall,--also a photograph enlarged to life-size. Lucy had noticed neither
of these pictures when she came in, because the light from the windows
was in her eyes. Now, turning to go out through the door led by Wemyss,
she was faced by this one.

It was Vera. She knew at once; and if she hadn't she would have known
the next minute, because he told her.

'Vera,' he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, as it were introducing them.

'Vera,' repeated Lucy under her breath; and she and Vera--for this
photograph too followed one about with its eye--stared at each other.

It must have been taken about twelve years earlier, judging from the
clothes. She was standing, and in a day dress that yet had a train to it
trailing on the carpet, and loose, floppy sleeves and a high collar. She
looked very tall, and had long thin fingers. Her dark hair was drawn up
from her ears and piled on the top of her head. Her face was thin and
seemed to be chiefly eyes,--very big dark eyes that stared out of the
absurd picture in a kind of astonishment, and her mouth had a little
twist in it as though she were trying not to laugh.

Lucy looked at her without moving. So this was Vera. Of course. She had
known, though she had never constructed any image of her in her mind,
had carefully avoided doing it, that she would be like that. Only older;
the sort of Vera she must have been at forty when she died,--not
attractive like that, not a young woman. To Lucy at twenty-two, forty
seemed very old; at least, if you were a woman. In regard to men, since
she had fallen in love with some one of forty-five who was certainly the
youngest thing she had ever come across, she had rearranged her ideas of
age, but she still thought forty very old for a woman. Vera had been
thin and tall and dark in her idea of her, just as this Vera was thin
and tall and dark; but thin bonily, tall stoopingly, and her dark hair
was turning grey. In her idea of her, too, she was absent-minded and not
very intelligent; indeed, she was rather troublesomely unintelligent,
doing obstinate, foolish things, and at last doing that fatal,
obstinate, foolish thing which so dreadfully ended her. This Vera was
certainly intelligent. You couldn't have eyes like that and be a fool.
And the expression of her mouth,--what had she been trying not to laugh
at that day? Did she know she was going to be enlarged and hang for
years in the bleak dining-room facing her father-in-law, each of them
eyeing the other from their walls, while three times a day the originals
sat down beneath their own pictures at the long table and ate? Perhaps
she laughed, thought Lucy, because else she might have cried; only that
would have been silly, and she couldn't have been silly,--not with those
eyes, not with those straight, fine eyebrows. But would she, herself,
presently be photographed too and enlarged and hung there? There was
room next to Vera, room for just one more before the sideboard began.
How very odd it would be if she were hung up next to Vera, and every day
three times as she went out of the room was faced by Everard's wives.
And how quaint to watch one's clothes as the years went by leaving off
being pretty and growing more absurd. Really for such purposes one ought
to be just wrapped round in a shroud. Fashion didn't touch shrouds; they
always stayed the same. Besides, how suitable, thought Lucy, gazing into
her dead predecessor's eyes; one would only be taking time by the
forelock....

'Come along.' said Wemyss, drawing her away, 'I want my coffee. Don't
you think it's a good idea,' he went on, as he led her down the hall to
the library door, 'to have life-sized photographs instead of those
idiotic portraits that are never the least like people?'

'Oh, a _very_ good idea,' said Lucy mechanically, bracing herself for
the library. There was only one room in the house she dreaded going into
more than the library, and that was the sitting-room on the top
floor,--her sitting-room and Vera's.

'Next week we'll go to a photographer's in London and have my little
girl done,' said Wemyss, pushing open the library door, 'and then I'll
have her exactly as God made her, without some artist idiot or other
coming butting-in with his idea of her. God's idea of her is good enough
for me. They won't have to enlarge much,' he laughed, 'to get _you_
life-size, you midge. Vera was five foot ten. Now isn't this a fine
room? Look--there's the river. Isn't it jolly being so close to it? Come
round here--don't knock against my writing-table, now. Look--there's
only the towpath between the river and the garden. Lord, what a beastly
day. It might just as easily have been a beautiful spring day and us
having our coffee out on the terrace. Don't you think this is a
beautiful look-out,--so typically English with the beautiful green lawn
and the bit of lush grass along the towpath, and the river. There's no
river like it in the world, is there, little Love. Say you think it's
the most beautiful river in the world'--he hugged her close--'say you
think it's a hundred times better than that beastly French one we got so
sick of with all those châteaux.'

'Oh, a _hundred_ times better,' said Lucy.

They were standing at the window, with his arm round her shoulder. There
was just room for them between it and the writing-table. Outside was the
flagged terrace, and then a very green lawn with worms and blackbirds on
it and a flagged path down the middle leading to a little iron gate.
There was no willow hedge along the river end of the square garden, so
as not to interrupt the view,--only the iron railings and wire-netting.
Terra-cotta vases, which later on would be a blaze of geraniums, Wemyss
explained, stood at intervals on each side of the path. The river,
swollen and brown, slid past Wemyss's frontage very quickly that day,
for there had been much rain. The clouds scudding across the sky before
the wind were not in such a hurry but that every now and then they let
loose a violent gust of rain, soaking the flags of the terrace again just
as the wind had begun to dry them up. How could he stand there, she
thought, holding her tight so that she couldn't get away, making her
look out at the very place on those flags not two yards off....

But the next minute she thought how right he really was, how absolutely
the only way this was to do the thing. Perfect simplicity was the one
way to meet this situation successfully; and she herself was so far from
simplicity that here she was shrinking, not able to bear to look,
wanting only to hide her face,--oh, he was wonderful, and she was the
most ridiculous of fools.

She pressed very close to him, and put up her face to his, shutting her
eyes, for so she shut out the desolating garden with its foreground of
murderous flags.

'What is it, little Love?' asked Wemyss.

'Kiss me,' she said; and he laughed and kissed her, but hastily, because
he wanted her to go on admiring the view.

She still, however, held up her face. 'Kiss my eyes,' she whispered,
keeping them shut. 'They're tired----'

He laughed again, but with a slight impatience, and kissed her eyes; and
then, suddenly struck by her little blind face so close to his, the
strong light from the big window showing all its delicate curves and
delicious softnesses, his Lucy's face, his own little wife's, he kissed
her really, as she loved him to kiss her, becoming absorbed only in his
love.

'Oh, I love you, love you----' murmured Lucy, clinging to him, making
secret vows of sensibleness, of wholesomeness, of a determined,
unfailing future simplicity.

'Aren't we happy,' he said, pausing in his kisses to gaze down at what
was now his face, for was it not much more his than hers? Of course it
was his. She never saw it, except when she specially went to look, but
he saw it all the time; she only had duties in regard to it, but he was
on the higher plane of only having joys. She washed it, but he kissed
it. And he kissed it when he liked and as much as ever he liked. 'Isn't
it wonderful being married,' he said, gazing down at this delightful
thing that was his very own for ever.

'Oh--wonderful!' murmured Lucy, opening her eyes and gazing into his.

Her face broke into a charming smile. 'You have the dearest eyes,' she
said, putting up her finger and gently tracing his eyebrows with it.

Wemyss's eyes, full at that moment of love and pride, were certainly
dear eyes, but a noise at the other end of the room made Lucy jump so in
his arms, gave her apparently such a fright, that when he turned his
head to see who it was daring to interrupt them, daring to startle his
little girl like that, and beheld the parlourmaid, his eyes weren't dear
at all but very angry.

The parlourmaid had come in with the coffee; and seeing the two
interlaced figures against the light of the big window had pulled up
short, uncertain what to do. This pulling up had jerked a spoon off its
saucer onto the floor with a loud rattle because of the floor not having
a carpet on it and being of polished oak, and it was this noise that
made Lucy jump so excessively that her jump actually made Wemyss jump
too.

In the parlourmaid's untrained phraseology there had been a good deal of
billing and cooing during luncheon, and even in the hall before luncheon
there were examples of it, but what she found going on in the library
was enough to make anybody stop dead and upset things,--it was such, she
said afterwards in the kitchen, that if she didn't know for a fact that
they were really married she wouldn't have believed it. Married people
in the parlourmaid's experience didn't behave like that. What affection
there was was exhibited before, and not after, marriage. And she went on
to describe the way in which Wemyss--thus briefly and irreverently did
they talk of their master in the kitchen--had flown at her for having
come into the library. 'After telling me to,' she said. 'After saying,
"We'll 'ave coffee in the library."' And they all agreed, as they had
often before agreed, that if it weren't that he was in London half the
time they wouldn't stay in the place five minutes.

Meanwhile Wemyss and Lucy were sitting side by side in two enormous
chairs facing the unlit library fire drinking their coffee. The fire was
only lit in the evenings, explained Wemyss, after the 1st of April; the
weather ought to be warm enough by then to do without fires in the
daytime, and if it wasn't it was its own look-out.

'Why did you jump so?' he asked. 'You gave me such a start. I couldn't
think what was the matter.'

'I don't know,' said Lucy, faintly flushing. 'Perhaps'--she smiled at
him over the arm of the enormous chair in which she almost totally
disappeared--'because the maid caught us.'

'Caught us?'

'Being so particularly affectionate.'

'I like that,' said Wemyss. 'Fancy feeling guilty because you're being
affectionate to your own husband.'

'Oh, well,' laughed Lucy, 'don't forget I haven't had him long.'

'You're such a complicated little thing. I shall have to take you
seriously in hand and teach you to be natural. I can't have you having
all sorts of finicking ideas about not doing this and not doing the
other before servants. Servants don't matter. I never consider them.'

'I wish you had considered the poor parlourmaid,' said Lucy, seeing that
he was in an unoffended frame of mind. 'Why did you give her such a
dreadful scolding?'

'Why? Because she made you jump so. You couldn't have jumped more if you
had thought it was a ghost. I won't have your flesh being made to
creep.'

'But it crept much worse when I heard the things you said to her.'

'Nonsense. These people have to be kept in order. What did the woman
mean by coming in like that?'

'Why, you told her to bring us coffee.'

'But I didn't tell her to make an infernal noise by dropping spoons all
over the place.'

'That was because she got just as great a fright when she saw us as I
did when I heard her.'

'I don't care what she got. Her business is not to drop things. That's
what I pay her for. But look here--don't you go thinking such a lot of
tangled-up things and arguing. Do, for goodness sake, try and be
simple.'

'I feel _very_ simple,' said Lucy, smiling and putting out her hand to
him, for his face was clouding. 'Do you know, Everard, I believe what's
the matter with me is that I'm _too_ simple.'

Wemyss roared, and forgot how near he was getting to being hurt. 'You
simple! You're the most complicated----'

'No I'm not. I've got the untutored mind and uncontrolled emotions of a
savage. That's really why I jumped.'

'Lord,' laughed Wemyss, 'listen to her how she talks. Anybody might
think she was clever, saying such big long words, if they didn't know
she was just her Everard's own little wife. Come here, my little
savage--come and sit on your husband's knee and tell him all about it.'

He held out his arms, and Lucy got up and went into them and he rocked
her and said, 'There, there--was it a little untutored savage then----'

But she didn't tell him all about it, first because by now she knew that
to tell him all about anything was asking for trouble, and second
because he didn't really want to know. Everard, she was beginning to
realise with much surprise, preferred not to know. He was not merely
incurious as to other people's ideas and opinions, he definitely
preferred to be unconscious of them.

This was a great contrast to the restless curiosity and interest of her
father and his friends, to their insatiable hunger for discussion, for
argument; and it much surprised Lucy. Discussion was the very salt of
life for them,--a tireless exploration of each other's ideas, a clashing
of them together, and out of that clashing the creation of fresh ones.
To Everard, Lucy was beginning to perceive, discussion merely meant
contradiction, and he disliked contradiction, he disliked even
difference of opinion. 'There's only one way of looking at a thing, and
that's the right way,' as he said, 'so what's the good of such a lot of
talk?'

The right way was his way; and though he seemed by his direct,
unswerving methods to succeed in living mentally in a great calm, and
though after the fevers of her father's set this was to her immensely
restful, was it really a good thing? Didn't it cut one off from growth?
Didn't it shut one in an isolation? Wasn't it, frankly, rather like
death? Besides, she had doubts as to whether it were true that there was
only one way of looking at a thing, and couldn't quite believe that his
way was invariably the right way. But what did it matter after all,
thought Lucy, snuggled up on his knee with one arm round his neck,
compared to the great, glorious fact of their love? That at least was
indisputable and splendid. As to the rest, truth would go on being truth
whether Everard saw it or not; and if she were not going to be able to
talk over things with him she could anyhow kiss him, and how sweet that
was, thought Lucy. They understood each other perfectly when they
kissed. What, indeed, when such sweet means of communion existed, was
the good of a lot of talk?

'I believe you're asleep' said Wemyss, looking down at the face on his
breast.

'Sound,' said Lucy, smiling, her eyes shut.

'My baby.'

'My Everard.'



XVIII


But this only lasted as long as his pipe lasted. When that was finished
he put her off his knee, and said he was now ready to gratify her
impatience and show her everything; they would go over the house first,
and then the garden and outbuildings.

No woman was ever less impatient than Lucy. However, she pulled her hat
straight and tried to seem all readiness and expectancy. She wished the
wind wouldn't howl so. What an extraordinary dreary place the library
was. Well, any place would be dreary at half-past two o'clock on such an
afternoon, without a fire and with the rain beating against the window,
and that dreadful terrace just outside.

Wemyss stooped to knock out the ashes of his pipe on the bars of the
empty grate, and Lucy carefully kept her head turned away from the
window and the terrace towards the other end of the room. The other end
was filled with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and the books, in
neat rows and uniform editions, were packed so tightly in the shelves
that no one but an unusually determined reader would have the energy to
wrench one out. Reading was evidently not encouraged, for not only were
the books shut in behind glass doors, but the doors were kept locked and
the key hung on Wemyss's watch-chain. Lucy discovered this when Wemyss,
putting his pipe in his pocket, took her by the arm and walked her down
the room to admire the shelves. One of the volumes caught her eye, and
she tried to open the glass door to take it out and look at it. 'Why,'
she said surprised, 'it's locked.'

'Of course,' said Wemyss.

'Why but then nobody can get at them.'

'Precisely.'

'But----'

'People are so untrustworthy about books. I took pains to arrange mine
myself, and they're all in first-class-bindings and I don't want them
taken out and left lying anywhere by Tom, Dick, and Harry. If any one
wants to read they can come and ask me. Then I know exactly what is
taken, and can see that it is put back.' And he held up the key on his
watch-chain.

'But doesn't that rather discourage people?' asked Lucy, who was
accustomed to the most careless familiarity in intercourse with books,
to books loose everywhere, books overflowing out of their shelves, books
in every room, instantly accessible books, friendly books, books used to
being read aloud, with their hospitable pages falling open at a touch.

'All the better,' said Wemyss. '_I_ don't want anybody to read my books.'

Lucy laughed, though she was dismayed inside. 'Oh Everard--' she said,
'not even me?'

'You? You're different. You're my own little girl. Whenever you want to,
all you've got to do is to come and say, "Everard, your Lucy wants to
read," and I'll unlock the bookcase.'

'But--I shall be afraid I may be disturbing you.'

'People who love each other can't ever disturb each other.'

'That's true,' said Lucy.

'And they shouldn't ever be afraid of it.'

'I suppose they shouldn't,' said Lucy.

'So be simple, and when you want a thing just say so.' Lucy said she
would, and promised with many kisses to be simple, but she couldn't help
privately thinking it a difficult way of getting at a book.

'Macaulay, Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, British Poets, English Men of
Letters, _Encyclopædia Britannica_--I think there's about everything,'
said Wemyss, going over the gilt names on the backs of the volumes with
much satisfaction as he stood holding her in front of them. 'Whiteley's
did it for me. I said I had room for so and so many of such and such
sizes of the best modern writers in good bindings. I think they did it
very well, don't you little Love?'

'_Very_ well,' said Lucy, eyeing the shelves doubtfully.

She was of those who don't like the feel of prize books in their hands,
and all Wemyss's books might have been presented as prizes to deserving
schoolboys. They were handsome; their edges--she couldn't see them, but
she was sure--were marbled. They wouldn't open easily, and one's thumbs
would have to do a lot of tiring holding while one's eyes tried to peep
at the words tucked away towards the central crease. These were books
with which one took no liberties. She couldn't imagine idly turning
their pages in some lazy position out on the grass. Besides, their pages
wouldn't be idly turned; they would be, she was sure, obstinate with
expensiveness, stiff with the leather and gold of their covers.

Lucy stared at them, thinking all this so as not to think other things.
What she wanted to shut out was the wind sobbing up and down that
terrace behind her, and the consciousness of the fierce intermittent
squalls of rain beating on its flags, and the certainty that
upstairs.... Had Everard _no_ imagination, she thought, with a sudden
flare of rebellion, that he should expect her to use and to like using
the very sitting-room where Vera----

With a quick shiver she grabbed at her thoughts and caught them just in
time.

'Do you like Macaulay?' she asked, lingering in front of the bookcase,
for he was beginning to move her off towards the door.

'I haven't read him,' said Wemyss, still moving her.

'Which of all these do you like best?' she asked, holding back.

'Oh, I don't know,' said Wemyss, pausing a moment, pleased by her
evident interest in his books. 'I haven't much time for reading, you
must remember. I'm a busy man. By the time I've finished my day's work,
I'm not inclined for much more than the evening paper and a game of
bridge.'

'But what will you do with me, who don't play bridge?'

'Lord, you don't suppose I shall want to play bridge now that I've got
you?' he said. 'All I shall want is just to sit and look at you.'

She turned red with swift pleasure, and laughed, and hugged the arm that
was thrust through hers leading her to the door. How much she adored
him; when he said dear, absurd, simple things like that, how much she
adored him!

'Come upstairs now and take off your hat,' said Wemyss. 'I want to see
what my bobbed hair looks like in my home. Besides, aren't you dying to
see our bedroom?'

'Dying,' said Lucy, going up the oak staircase with a stout, determined
heart.

The bedroom was over the library, and was the same size and with the
same kind of window. Where the bookcase stood in the room below, stood
the bed: a double, or even a treble, bed, so very big was it, facing the
window past which Vera--it was no use, she couldn't get away from
Vera--having slept her appointed number of nights, fell and was
finished. But she wasn't finished. If only she had slipped away out of
memory, out of imagination, thought Lucy ... but she hadn't, she
hadn't--and this was her room, and that intelligent-eyed thin thing had
slept in it for years and years, and for years and years the
looking-glass had reflected her while she had dressed and undressed,
dressed and undressed before it--regularly, day after day, year after
year--oh, what a trouble--and her thin long hands had piled up her
hair--Lucy could see her sitting there piling it on the top of her small
head--sitting at the dressing-table in the window past which she was at
last to drop like a stone--horribly--ignominiously--all anyhow--and
everything in the room had been hers, every single thing in it had been
Vera's, including Ev----

Lucy made a violent lunge after her thoughts and strangled them.

Meanwhile Wemyss had shut the door and was standing looking at her
without moving.

'Well?' he said.

She turned to him nervously, her eyes still wide with the ridiculous
things she had been thinking.

'Well?' he said again.

She supposed he meant her to praise the room, so she hastily began,
saying what a good view there must be on a fine day, and how very
comfortable it was, such a nice big looking-glass--she loved a big
looking-glass--and such a nice sofa--she loved a nice sofa--and what a
very big bed--and what a lovely carpet----

'Well?' was all Wemyss said when her words came to an end.

'What is it, Everard?'

'I'm waiting,' he said.

'Waiting?'

'For my kiss.'

She ran to him.

'Yes,' he said, when she had kissed him, looking down at her solemnly,
'_I_ don't forget these things. _I_ don't forget that this is the first
time my own wife and I have stood together in our very own bedroom.'

'But Everard I didn't forget--I only----'

She cast about for something to say, her arms still round his neck, for
the last thing she could have told him was what she had been
thinking--oh, how he would have scolded her for being morbid, and oh,
how right he would have been!--and she ended by saying as lamely and as
unfortunately as she had said it in the château of Amboise--'I only
didn't remember.'

Luckily this time his attention had already wandered away from her.
'Isn't it a jolly room?' he said. 'Who's got far and away the best
bedroom in Strorley? And who's got a sitting-room all for herself, just
as jolly? And who spoils his little woman?'

Before she could answer, he loosened her hands from his neck and said,
'Come and look at yourself in the glass. Come and see how small you are
compared to the other things in the room.' And with his arms round her
shoulders he led her to the dressing-table.

'The other things?' laughed Lucy; but like a flame the thought was
leaping in her brain, 'Now what shall I do if when I look into this I
don't see myself but Vera? It's _accustomed_ to Vera....'

'Why, she's shutting her eyes. Open them, little Love,' said Wemyss,
standing with her before the glass and seeing in it that though he held
her in front of it she wasn't looking at the picture of wedded love he
and she made, but had got her eyes tight shut.

With his free hand he took off her hat and threw it on to the sofa; then
he laid his head on hers and said, 'Now look.'

Lucy obeyed; and when she saw the sweet picture in the glass the face of
the girl looking at her broke into its funny, charming smile, for
Everard at that moment was at his dearest, Everard boyishly loving her,
with his good-looking, unlined face so close to hers and his proud eyes
gazing at her. He and she seemed to set each other off; they were
becoming to each other.

Smiling at him in the glass, a smile tremulous with tenderness, she put
up her hand and stroked his face. 'Do you know who you've married?' she
asked, addressing the man in the glass.

'Yes,' said Wemyss, addressing the girl in the glass.

'No you don't,' she said. 'But I'll tell you. You've married the
completest of fools.'

'Now what has the little thing got into its head this time?' he said,
kissing her hair, and watching himself doing it.

'Everard, you must help me,' she murmured, holding his face tenderly
against hers. 'Please, my beloved, help me, teach me----'

'That, Mrs. Wemyss, is a very proper attitude in a wife,' he said. And
the four people laughed at each other, the two Lucys a little
quiveringly.

'Now come and I'll introduce you to your sitting-room,' he said,
disengaging himself. 'We'll have tea up there. The view is really
magnificent.'



XIX


The wind made more noise than ever at the top of the house, and when
Wemyss tried to open the door to Vera's sitting-room it blew back on
him.

'Well I'm damned,' he said, giving it a great shove.

'Why?' asked Lucy nervously.

'Come in, come in,' he said impatiently, pressing the door open and
pulling her through.

There was a great flapping of blinds and rattling of blind cords, a
whirl of sheets of notepaper, an extra wild shriek of the wind, and then
Wemyss, hanging on to the door, shut it and the room quieted down.

'That slattern Lizzie!' he exclaimed, striding across to the fireplace
and putting his finger on the bell-button and keeping it there.

'What has she done?' asked Lucy, standing where he had left her just
inside the door.

'Done? Can't you see?'

'You mean'--she could hardly get herself to mention the fatal
thing--'you mean--the window?'

'On a day like this!'

He continued to press the bell. It was a very loud bell, for it rang
upstairs as well as down in order to be sure of catching Lizzie's ear in
whatever part of the house she might be endeavouring to evade it, and
Lucy, as she listened to its strident, persistent summons of a Lizzie
who didn't appear, felt more and more on edge, felt at last that to
listen and wait any longer was unbearable.

'Won't you wear it out?' she asked, after some moments of nothing
happening and Wemyss still ringing.

He didn't answer. He didn't look at her. His finger remained steadily on
the button. His face was extraordinarily like the old man's in the
enlarged photograph downstairs. Lucy wished for only two things at that
moment, one was that Lizzie shouldn't come, and the other was that if
she did she herself might be allowed to go and be somewhere else.

'Hadn't--hadn't the window better be shut?' she suggested timidly
presently, while he still went on ringing and saying nothing--'else when
Lizzie opens the door won't all the things blow about again?'

He didn't answer, and went on ringing.

Of all the objects in the world that she could think of, Lucy most
dreaded and shrank from that window; nevertheless she began to feel that
as Everard was engaged with the bell and apparently wouldn't leave it,
it behoved her to put into practice her resolution not to be a fool but
to be direct and wholesome, and go and shut it herself. There it was,
the fatal window, huge as the one in the bedroom below and the one in
the library below that, yawning wide open above its murderous low sill,
with the rain flying in on every fresh gust of wind and wetting the
floor and the cushions of the sofa and even, as she could see, those
sheets of notepaper off the writing-table that had flown in her face
when she came in and were now lying scattered at her feet. Surely the
right thing to do was to shut the window before Lizzie opened the door
and caused a second convulsion? Everard couldn't, because he was ringing
the bell. She could and she would; yes, she would do the right thing,
and at the same time be both simple and courageous.

'I'll shut it,' she said, taking a step forward.

She was arrested by Wemyss's voice. 'Confound it!' he cried. 'Can't you
leave it alone?'

She stopped dead. He had never spoken to her like that before. She had
never heard that voice before. It seemed to hit her straight on the
heart.

'Don't interfere,' he said, very loud.

She was frozen where she stood.

'Tiresome woman,' he said, still ringing.

She looked at him. He was looking at her.

'Who?' she breathed.

'You.'

Her heart seemed to stop beating. She gave a little gasp, and turned her
head to right and left like something trapped, something searching for
escape. Everard--where was her Everard? Why didn't he come and take care
of her? Come and take her away--out of that room--out of that room----

There were sounds of steps hurrying along the passage, and then there
was a great scream of the wind and a great whirl of the notepaper and a
great blowing up on end off her forehead of her short hair, and Lizzie
was there panting on the threshold.

'I'm sorry, sir,' she panted, her hand on her chest, 'I was changing my
dress----'

'Shut the door, can't you?' cried Wemyss, about whose ears, too,
notepaper was flying. 'Hold on to it--don't let it go, damn you!'

'Oh--oh----' gasped Lucy, stretching out her hands as though to keep
something off, 'I think I--I think I'll go downstairs----'

And before Wemyss realised what she was doing, she had turned and
slipped through the door Lizzie was struggling with and was gone.

'Lucy!' he shouted, 'Lucy! Come back at once!' But the wind was too much
for Lizzie, and the door dragged itself out of her hands and crashed to.

As though the devil were after her Lucy ran along the passage. Down the
stairs she flew, down past the bedroom landing, down past the gong
landing, down into the hall and across it to the front door, and tried
to pull it open, and found it was bolted, and tugged and tugged at the
bolts, tugged frantically, getting them undone at last, and rushing out
on to the steps.

There an immense gust of rain caught her full in the face.
Splash--bang--she was sobered. The rain splashed on her as though a
bucket were being emptied at her, and the door had banged behind her
shutting her out. Suddenly horrified at herself she turned quickly, as
frantic to get in again as she had been to get out. What was she doing?
Where was she running to? She must get in, get in--before Everard could
come after her, before he could find her standing there like a drenched
dog outside his front door. The wind whipped her wet hair across her
eyes. Where was the handle? She couldn't find it. Her hair wouldn't keep
out of her eyes; her thin serge skirt blew up like a balloon and got in
the way of her trembling fingers searching along the door. She must get
in--before he came--what had possessed her? Everard--he couldn't have
meant--he didn't mean--what would he think--what _would_ he think--oh,
where was that handle?

Then she heard heavy footsteps on the other side of the door, and
Wemyss's voice, still very loud, saying to somebody he had got with
him, 'Haven't I given strict orders that this door is to be kept
bolted?'--and then the sound of bolts being shot.

'Everard! Everard!' Lucy cried, beating on the door with both hands,
'I'm here--out here--let me in--Everard! Everard!'

But he evidently heard nothing, for his footsteps went away again.

Snatching her hair out of her eyes, she looked about for the bell and
reached up to it and pulled it violently. What she had done was
terrible. She must get in at once, face the parlourmaid's astonishment,
run to Everard. She couldn't imagine his thoughts. Where did he suppose
she was? He must be searching the house for her. He would be dreadfully
upset. Why didn't the parlourmaid come? Was she changing her dress too?
No--she had waited at lunch all ready in her black afternoon clothes.
Then why didn't she come?

Lucy pulled the bell again and again, at last keeping it down, using up
its electricity as squanderously as Wemyss had used it upstairs. She was
wet to the skin by this time, and you wouldn't have recognised her
pretty hair, all dark now and sticking together in lank strands.

Everard--why, of course--Everard had only spoken like that out of
fear--fear and love. The window--of course he would be terrified lest
she too, trying to shut that fatal window, that great heavy fatal
window, should slip.... Oh, of course, of course--how could she have
misunderstood--in moments of danger, of dreadful anxiety for one's
heart's beloved, one did speak sharply, one did rap out commands. It was
because he loved her so _much_.... Oh, how lunatic of her to have
misunderstood!

At last she heard some one coming, and she let go of the bell and braced
herself to meet the astonished gaze of the parlourmaid with as much
dignity as was possible in one who only too well knew she must be
looking like a drowning cat, but the footsteps grew heavy as they got
nearer, and it was Wemyss who, after pulling back the bolts, opened the
door.

'Oh Everard!' Lucy exclaimed, running in, pursued to the last by the
pelting rain, 'I'm so glad it's you--oh I'm so sorry I----'

Her voice died away; she had seen his face.

He stooped to bolt the lower bolt.

'Don't be angry, darling Everard,' she whispered, laying her arm on his
stooping shoulder.

Having finished with the bolt Wemyss straightened himself, and then,
putting up his hand to the arm still round his shoulder, he removed it.
'You'll make my coat wet,' he said; and walked away to the library door
and went in and shut it.

For a moment she stood where he had left her, collecting her scattered
senses; then she went after him. Wet or not wet, soaked and dripping as
she was, ridiculous scarecrow with her clinging clothes, her lank hair,
she must go after him, must instantly get the horror of misunderstanding
straight, tell him how she had meant only to help over that window, tell
him how she had thought he was saying dreadful things to her when he was
really only afraid for her safety, tell him how silly she had been,
silly, silly, not to have followed his thoughts quicker, tell him he
must forgive her, be patient with her, help her, because she loved him
so much and she knew--oh, she knew--how much he loved her....

Across the hall ran Lucy, the whole of her one welter of anxious
penitence and longing and love, and when she got to the door and turned
the handle it was locked.

He had locked her out.



XX


Her hand slid slowly off the knob. She stood quite still. How _could_
he.... And she knew now that he had bolted the front door knowing she
was out in the rain. How _could_ he? Her body was motionless as she
stood staring at the locked door, but her brain was a rushing confusion
of questions. Why? Why? This couldn't be Everard. Who was this
man--pitiless, cruel? Not Everard. Not her lover. Where was he, her
lover and husband? Why didn't he come and take care of her, and not let
her be frightened by this strange man....

She heard a chair being moved inside the room, and then she heard the
creak of leather as Wemyss sat down in it, and then there was the rustle
of a newspaper being opened. He was actually settling down to read a
newspaper while she, his wife, his love--wasn't he always telling her
she was his little Love?--was breaking her heart outside the locked
door. Why, but Everard--she and Everard; they understood each other;
they had laughed, played together, talked nonsense, been friends....

For an instant she had an impulse to cry out and beat on the door, not
to care who heard, not to care that the whole house should come and
gather round her naked misery; but she was stopped by a sudden new
wisdom. It shuddered down on her heart, a wisdom she had never known or
needed before, and held her quiet. At all costs there mustn't be two of
them doing these things, at all costs these things mustn't be doubled,
mustn't have echoes. If Everard was like this he must be like it alone.
She must wait. She must sit quiet till he had finished. Else--but oh, he
_couldn't_ be like it, it _couldn't_ be true that he didn't love her.
Yet if he did love her, how could he ... how could he....

She leaned her forehead against the door and began softly to cry. Then,
afraid that she might after all burst out into loud, disgraceful
sobbing, she turned and went upstairs.

But where could she go? Where in the whole house was any refuge, any
comfort? The only person who could have told her anything, who could
have explained, who _knew_, was Vera. Yes--she would have understood.
Yes, yes--Vera. She would go to Vera's room, get as close to her mind as
she could,--search, find something, some clue....

It seemed now to Lucy, as she hurried upstairs, that the room in the
house she had most shrunk from was the one place where she might hope to
find comfort. Oh, she wasn't frightened any more. Everything was trying
to frighten her, but she wasn't going to be frightened. For some reason
or other things were all trying together to-day to see if they could
crush her, beat out her spirit. But they weren't going to....

She jerked her wet hair out of her eyes as she climbed the stairs. It
kept on getting into them and making her stumble. Vera would help her.
Vera never was beaten. Vera had had fifteen years of not being beaten
before she--before she had that accident. And there must have been heaps
of days just like this one, with the wind screaming and Vera up in her
room and Everard down in his--locked in, perhaps--and yet Vera had
managed, and her spirit wasn't beaten out. For years and years, panted
Lucy--her very thoughts came in gasps--Vera lived up here winter after
winter, years, years, years, and would have been here now if she
hadn't--oh, if only Vera weren't dead! If _only, only_ Vera weren't
dead! But her mind lived on--her mind was in that room, in every
littlest thing in it----

Lucy stumbled up the last few stairs completely out of breath, and
opening the sitting-room door stood panting on the threshold much as
Lizzie had done, her hand on her chest.

This time everything was in order. The window was shut, the scattered
notepaper collected and tidily on the writing-table, the rain on the
floor wiped up, and a fire had been lit and the wet cushions were drying
in front of it. Also there was Lizzie, engaged in conscience-stricken
activities, and when Lucy came in she was on her knees poking the fire.
She was poking so vigorously that she didn't hear the door open,
especially not with that rattling and banging of the window going on;
and on getting up and seeing the figure standing there panting, with
strands of lank hair in its eyes and its general air of neglect and
weather, she gave a loud exclamation.

'Lumme!' exclaimed Lizzie, whose origin and bringing-up had been
obscure.

She had helped carry in the luggage that morning, so she had seen her
mistress before and knew what she was like in her dry state. She never
could have believed, having seen her then all nicely fluffed out, that
there was so little of her. Lizzie knew what long-haired dogs look like
when they are being soaped, and she was also familiar with cats as
they appear after drowning; yet they too surprised her, in spite of
familiarity, each time she saw them in these circumstances by their want
of real substance, of stuffing. Her mistress looked just like that,--no
stuffing at all; and therefore Lizzie, the poker she was holding
arrested in mid-air on its way into its corner, exclaimed Lumme.

Then, realising that this weather-beaten figure must certainly be
catching its death of cold, she dropped the poker and hurrying across
the room and talking in the stress of the moment like one girl to
another, she felt Lucy's sleeve and said, 'Why, you're wet to the bones.
Come to the fire and take them sopping clothes off this minute, or
you'll be laid up as sure as sure----' and pulled her over to the fire;
and having got her there, and she saying nothing at all and not
resisting, Lizzie stripped off her clothes and shoes and stockings,
repeating at frequent intervals as she did so, 'Dear, dear,' and
repressing a strong desire to beg her not to take on, lest later,
perhaps, her mistress mightn't like her to have noticed she had been
crying. Then she snatched up a woollen coverlet that lay folded on the
end of the sofa, rolled her tightly round in it, sat her in a chair
right up close to the fender, and still talking like one girl to another
said, 'Now sit there and don't move while I fetch dry things--I won't be
above a minute--now you promise, don't you----' and hurrying to the door
never remembered her manners at all till she was through it, whereupon
she put in her head again and hastily said, 'Mum,' and disappeared.

She was away, however, more than a minute. Five minutes, ten minutes
passed and Lizzie, feverishly unpacking Lucy's clothes in the bedroom
below, and trying to find a complete set of them, and not knowing what
belonged to which, didn't come back.

Lucy sat quite still, rolled up in Vera's coverlet. Obediently she
didn't move, but stared straight into the fire, sitting so close up to
it that the rest of the room was shut out. She couldn't see the window,
or the dismal rain streaming down it. She saw nothing but the fire,
blazing cheerfully. How kind Lizzie was. How comforting kindness was. It
was a thing she understood, a normal, natural thing, and it made her
feel normal and natural just to be with it. Lizzie had given her such a
vigorous rub-down that her skin tingled. Her hair was on ends, for that
too had had a vigorous rubbing from Lizzie, who had taken her apron to
it feeling that this was an occasion on which one abandoned convention
and went in for resource. And as Lucy sat there getting warmer and
warmer, and more and more pervaded by the feeling of relief and
well-being that even the most wretched feel if they take off all their
clothes, her mind gradually calmed down, it left off asking agonised
questions, and presently her heart began to do the talking.

She was so much accustomed to find life kind, that given a moment of
quiet like this with somebody being good-natured and back she slipped to
her usual state, which was one of affection and confidence. Lizzie
hadn't been gone five minutes before Lucy had passed from sheer
bewildered misery to making excuses for Everard; in ten minutes she was
seeing good reasons for what he had done; in fifteen she was blaming
herself for most of what had happened. She had been amazingly idiotic to
run out of the room, and surely quite mad to run out of the house. It
was wrong, of course, for him to bolt her out, but he was angry, and
people did things when they were angry that horrified them afterwards.
Surely people who easily got angry needed all the sympathy and
understanding one could give them,--not to be met by despair and the
loss of faith in them of the person they had hurt. That only turned
passing, temporary bad things into a long unhappiness. She hadn't known
he had a temper. She had only, so far, discovered his extraordinary
capacity for being offended. Well, if he had a temper how could he help
it? He was born that way, as certainly as if he had been born lame.
Would she not have been filled with tenderness for his lameness if he
had happened to be born like that? Would it ever have occurred to her to
mind, to feel it as a grievance?

The warmer Lucy got the more eager she grew to justify Wemyss. In the
middle of the reasons she was advancing for his justification, however,
it suddenly struck her that they were a little smug. All that about
people with tempers needing sympathy,--who was she, with her impulses
and impatiences--with her, as she now saw, devastating impulses and
impatiences--to take a line of what was very like pity. Pity! Smug,
odious word; smug, odious thing. Wouldn't she hate it if she thought he
pitied her for her failings? Let him be angry with her failings, but not
pity her. She and her man, they needed no pity from each other; they had
love. It was impossible that anything either of them did or was should
_really_ touch that.

Very warm now in Vera's blanket, her face flushed by the fire, Lucy
asked herself what could really put out that great, glorious, central
blaze. All that was needed was patience when he.... She gave herself a
shake,--there she was again, thinking smugly. She wouldn't think at all.
She would just take things as they came, and love, and love.

Then the vision of Everard, sitting solitary with his newspaper and by
this time, too, probably thinking only of love, and anyhow not happy,
caused one of those very impulses to lay hold of her which she had a
moment before been telling herself she would never give way to again.
She was aware one had gripped her, but this was a good impulse,--this
wasn't a bad one like running out into the rain: she would go down and
have another try at that door. She was warmed through now and quite
reasonable, and she felt she couldn't another minute endure not being at
peace with Everard. How silly they were. It was ridiculous. It was like
two children fighting. Lizzie was so long bringing her clothes; she
couldn't wait, she must sit on Everard's knee again, feel his arms round
her, see his eyes looking kind. She would go down in her blanket. It
wrapped her up from top to toe. Only her feet were bare; but they were
quite warm, and anyhow feet didn't matter.

So Lucy padded softly downstairs, making hardly a sound, and certainly
none that could be heard above the noise of the wind by Lizzie in the
bedroom, frantically throwing clothes about.

She knocked at the library door.

Wemyss's voice said, 'Come in.'

So he had unlocked it. So he had hoped she would come.

He didn't, however, look round. He was sitting with his back to the door
at the writing-table in the window, writing.

'I want my flowers in here,' he said, without turning his head.

So he had rung. So he thought it was the parlourmaid. So he hadn't
unlocked the door because he hoped she would come.

But his flowers,--he wanted his birthday flowers in there because they
were all that were left to him of his ruined birthday.

When she heard this order Lucy's heart rushed out to him. She shut the
door softly and with her bare feet making no sound went up behind him.

He thought the parlourmaid had shut the door, and gone to carry out his
order. Feeling an arm put round his shoulder he thought the parlourmaid
hadn't gone to carry out his order, but had gone mad instead.

'Good God!' he exclaimed, jumping up.

At the sight of Lucy in her blanket, with her bare feet and her confused
hair, his face changed. He stared at her without speaking.

'I've come to tell you--I've come to tell you----' she began.

Then she faltered, for his mouth was a mere hard line.

'Everard, darling,' she said entreatingly, lifting her face to his,
'let's be friends--please let's be friends--I'm so sorry--so sorry----'

His eyes ran over her. It was evident that all she had on was that
blanket. A strange fury came into his face, and he turned his back on
her and marched with a heavy tread to the door, a tread that made Lucy,
for some reason she couldn't at first understand, think of Elgar. Why
Elgar? part of her asked, puzzled, while the rest of her was blankly
watching Wemyss. Of course: the march: _Pomp and Circumstance_.

At the door he turned and said, 'Since you thrust yourself into my room
when I have shown you I don't desire your company you force me to leave
it.'

Then he added, his voice sounding queer and through his teeth, 'You'd
better go and put your clothes on. I assure you I'm proof against sexual
allurements.'

Then he went out.

Lucy stood looking at the door. Sexual allurements? What did he mean?
Did he think--did he mean----

She flushed suddenly, and gripping her blanket tight about her she too
marched to the door, her eyes bright and fixed.

Considering the blanket, she walked upstairs with a good deal of
dignity, and passed the bedroom door just as Lizzie, her arms full of a
complete set of clothing, came out of it.

'Lumme!' once more exclaimed Lizzie, who seemed marked down for shocks;
and dropped a hairbrush and a shoe.

Disregarding her, Lucy proceeded up the next flight with the same
dignity, and having reached Vera's room crossed to the fire, where she
stood in silence while Lizzie, who had hurried after her and was
reproaching her for having gone downstairs like that, dressed her and
brushed her hair.

She was quite silent. She didn't move. She was miles away from Lizzie,
absorbed in quite a new set of astonished, painful thoughts. But at the
end, when Lizzie asked her if there was anything more she could do, she
looked at her a minute and then, having realised her, put out her hand
and laid it on her arm.

'Thank you _very_ much for everything,' she said earnestly.

'I'm terribly sorry about that window, mum,' said Lizzie, who was sure
she had been the cause of trouble. 'I don't know what come over me to
forget it.'

Lucy smiled faintly at her. 'Never mind,' she said; and she thought that
if it hadn't been for that window she and Everard--well, it was no use
thinking like that; perhaps there would have been something else.

Lizzie went. She was a recent acquisition, and was the only one of the
servants who hadn't known the late Mrs. Wemyss, but she told herself
that anyhow she preferred this one. She went; and Lucy stood where she
had left her, staring at the floor, dropping back into her quite new set
of astonished, painful thoughts.

Everard,--that was an outrage, that about sexual allurements; just
simply an outrage. She flushed at the remembrance of it; her whole body
seemed to flush hot. She felt as though never again would she be able to
bear him making love to her. He had spoilt that. But that was a dreadful
way to feel, that was destructive of the very heart of marriage. No, she
mustn't let herself,--she must stamp that feeling out; she must forget
what he had said. He couldn't really have meant it. He was still in a
temper. She oughtn't to have gone down. But how could she know? All this
was new to her, a new side of Everard. Perhaps, she thought, watching
the reflection of the flames flickering on the shiny, slippery oak
floor, only people with tempers should marry people with tempers. They
would understand each other, say the same sorts of things, tossing them
backwards and forwards like a fiery, hissing ball, know the exact time
it would last, and be saved by their vivid emotions from the deadly
hurt, the deadly loneliness of the one who couldn't get into a rage.

Loneliness.

She lifted her head and looked round the room.

No, she wasn't lonely. There was still----

Suddenly she went to the bookshelves, and began pulling out the books
quickly, hungrily reading their names, turning over their pages in a
kind of starving hurry to get to know, to get to understand, Vera....



XXI


Meanwhile Wemyss had gone into the drawing-room till such time as his
wife should choose to allow him to have his own library to himself
again.

For a long while he walked up and down it thinking bitter things, for he
was very angry. The drawing-room was a big gaunt room, rarely used of
recent years. In the early days, when people called on the newly arrived
Wemysses, there had been gatherings in it,--retaliatory festivities to
the vicar, to the doctor, to the landlord, with a business acquaintance
or two of Wemyss's, wife appended, added to fill out. These festivities,
however, died of inanition. Something was wanting, something necessary
to nourish life in them. He thought of them as he walked about the
echoing room from which the last guest had departed years ago. Vera, of
course. Her fault that the parties had left off. She had been so slack,
so indifferent. You couldn't expect people to come to your house if you
took no pains to get them there. Yet what a fine room for entertaining.
The grand piano, too. Never used. And Vera who made such a fuss about
music, and pretended she knew all about it.

The piano was clothed from head to foot in a heavy red baize cover, even
its legs being buttoned round in what looked like Alpine Sport gaiters,
and the baize flap that protected the keys had buttons all along it from
one end to the other. In order to play, these buttons had first to be
undone,--Wemyss wasn't going to have the expensive piano not taken care
of. It had been his wedding present to Vera--how he had loved that
woman!--and he had had the baize clothes made specially, and had
instructed Vera that whenever the piano was not in use it was to have
them on, properly fastened.

What trouble he had had with her at first about it. She was always
forgetting to button it up again. She would be playing, and get up and
go away to lunch, or tea, or out into the garden, and leave it uncovered
with the damp and dust getting into it, and not only uncovered but with
its lid open. Then, when she found that he went in to see if she had
remembered, she did for a time cover it up in the intervals of playing,
but never buttoned all its buttons; invariably he found that some had
been forgotten. It had cost £150. Women had no sense of property. They
were unfit to have the charge of valuables. Besides, they got tired of
them. Vera had actually quite soon got tired of the piano. His present.
That wasn't very loving of her. And when he said anything about it she
wouldn't speak. Sulked. How profoundly he disliked sulking. And she, who
had made such a fuss about music when first he met her, gave up playing,
and for years no one had touched the piano. Well, at least it was being
taken care of.

From habit he stooped and ran his eye up its gaiters.

All buttoned.

Stay--no; one buttonhole gaped.

He stooped closer and put out his hand to button it, and found the
button gone. No button. Only an end of thread. How was that?

He straightened himself, and went to the fireplace and rang the bell.
Then he waited, looking at his watch. Long ago he had timed the
distances between the different rooms and the servants' quarters,
allowing for average walking and one minute's margin for getting under
way at the start, so that he knew exactly at what moment the parlourmaid
ought to appear.

She appeared just as time was up and his finger was moving towards the
bell again.

'Look at that piano-leg,' said Wemyss.

The parlourmaid, not knowing which leg, looked at all three so as to be
safe.

'What do you see?' he asked.

The parlourmaid was reluctant to say. What she saw was piano-legs, but
she felt that wasn't the right answer.

'What do you _not_ see?' Wemyss asked, louder.

This was much more difficult, because there were so many things she
didn't see; her parents, for instance.

'Are you deaf, woman?' he inquired.

She knew the answer to that, and said it quickly. 'No sir,' she said.

'Look at that piano-leg, I say,' said Wemyss, pointing with his pipe.

It was, so to speak, the off fore-leg at which he pointed, and the
parlourmaid, relieved to be given a clue, fixed her eye on it earnestly.

'What do you see?' he asked. 'Or, rather, what do you not see?'

The parlourmaid looked hard at what she saw, leaving what she didn't see
to take care of itself. It seemed unreasonable to be asked to look at
what she didn't see. But though she looked, she could see nothing to
justify speech. Therefore she was silent.

'Don't you see there's a button off?'

The parlourmaid, on looking closer, did see that, and said so.

'Isn't it your business to attend to this room?'

She admitted that it was.

'Buttons don't come off of themselves,' Wemyss informed her.

The parlourmaid, this not being a question, said nothing.

'Do they?' he asked loudly.

'No sir,' said the parlourmaid; though she could have told him many a
story of things buttons did do of themselves, coming off in your hand
when you hadn't so much as begun to touch them. Cups, too. The way cups
would fall apart in one's hand----

She, however, merely said, 'No sir.'

'Only wear and tear makes them come off,' Wemyss announced; and
continuing judicially, emphasising his words with a raised forefinger,
he said: 'Now attend to me. This piano hasn't been used for years. Do
you hear that? Not for years. To my certain knowledge not for years.
Therefore the cover cannot have been unbuttoned legitimately, it cannot
have been unbuttoned by any one authorised to unbutton it.
Therefore----'

He pointed his finger straight at her and paused. 'Do you follow me?' he
asked sternly.

The parlourmaid hastily reassembled her wandering thoughts. 'Yes sir,'
she said.

'Therefore some one unauthorised has unbuttoned the cover, and some one
unauthorised has played on the piano. Do you understand?'

'Yes sir,' said the parlourmaid.

'It is hardly credible,' he went on, 'but nevertheless the conclusion
can't be escaped, that some one has actually taken advantage of my
absence to play on that piano. Some one in this house has actually
dared----'

'There's the tuner,' said the parlourmaid tentatively, not sure if that
would be an explanation, for Wemyss's lucid sentences, almost of a legal
lucidity, invariably confused her, but giving the suggestion for what it
was worth. 'I understood the orders was to let the tuner in once a
quarter, sir. Yesterday was his day. He played for a hour. And 'ad the
baize and everything off, and the lid leaning against the wall.'

True. True. The tuner. Wemyss had forgotten the tuner. The tuner had
standing instructions to come and tune. Well, why couldn't the
fool-woman have reminded him sooner? But the tuner having tuned didn't
excuse the parlourmaid's not having sewn on the button the tuner had
pulled off.

He told her so.

'Yes sir,' she said.

'You will have that button on in five minutes,' he said, pulling out his
watch. 'In five minutes exactly from now that button will be on. I shall
be staying in this room, so shall see for myself that you carry out my
orders.'

'Yes sir,' said the parlourmaid.

He walked to the window and stood staring at the wild afternoon. She
remained motionless where she was.

What a birthday he was having. And with what joy he had looked forward
to it. It seemed to him very like the old birthdays with Vera, only so
much more painful because he had expected so much. Vera had got him used
to expecting very little; but it was Lucy, his adored Lucy, who was
inflicting this cruel disappointment on him. Lucy! Incredible. And she
to come down in that blanket, tempting him, very nearly getting him that
way rather than by the only right and decent way of sincere and obvious
penitence. Why, even Vera had never done a thing like that, not once in
all the years.

'Let's be friends,' says Lucy. Friends! Yes, she did say something about
sorry, but what about that blanket? Sorrow with no clothes on couldn't
possibly be genuine. It didn't go together with that kind of appeal. It
was not the sort of combination one expected in a wife. Why couldn't she
come down and apologise properly dressed? God, her little shoulder
sticking out--how he had wanted to seize and kiss it ... but then that
would have been giving in, that would have meant her triumph. Her
triumph, indeed--when it was she, and she only, who had begun the whole
thing, running out of the room like that, not obeying him when he
called, humiliating him before that damned Lizzie....

He thrust his hands into his pockets and turned away with a jerk from
the window.

There, standing motionless, was the parlourmaid.

'What? You still here?' he exclaimed. 'Why the devil don't you go and
fetch that button?'

'I understood your orders was none of us is to leave rooms without your
permission, sir.'

'You'd better be quick then,' he said, looking at his watch. 'I gave you
five minutes, and three of them have gone.'

She disappeared; and in the servants' sitting-room, while she was
hastily searching for her thimble and a button that would approximately
do, she told the others what they already knew but found satisfaction in
repeating often, that if it weren't that Wemyss was most of the week in
London, not a day, not a minute, would she stay in the place.

'There's the wages,' the cook reminded her.

Yes; they were good; higher than anywhere she had heard of. But what was
the making of the place was the complete freedom from Monday morning
every week to Friday tea-time. Almost anything could be put up with from
Friday tea-time till Monday morning, seeing that the rest of the week
they could do exactly as they chose, with the whole place as good as
belonging to them; and she hurried away, and got back to the
drawing-room thirty seconds over time.

Wemyss, however, wasn't there with his watch. He was on his way upstairs
to the top of the house, telling himself as he went that if Lucy chose
to take possession of his library he would go and take possession of her
sitting-room. It was only fair. But he knew she wasn't now in the
library. He knew she wouldn't stay there all that time. He wanted an
excuse to himself for going to where she was. She must beg his pardon
properly. He could hold out--oh, he could hold out all right for any
length of time, as she'd find out very soon if she tried the sulking
game with him--but to-day it was their first day in his home; it was his
birthday; and though nothing could be more monstrous than the way she
had ruined everything, yet if she begged his pardon properly he would
forgive her, he was ready to take her back the moment she showed real
penitence. Never was a woman loved as he loved Lucy. If only she would
be penitent, if only she would properly and sincerely apologise, then he
could kiss her again. He would kiss that little shoulder of hers, make
her pull her blouse back so that he could see it as he saw it down in
the library, sticking out of that damned blanket--God, how he loved
her....



XXII


The first thing he saw when he opened the door of the room at the top of
the house was the fire.

A fire. He hadn't ordered a fire. He must look into that. That officious
slattern Lizzie----

Then, before he had recovered from this, he had another shock. Lucy was
on the hearthrug, her head leaning against the sofa, sound asleep.

So that's what she had been doing,--just going comfortably to sleep,
while he----

He shut the door and walked over to the fireplace and stood with his
back to it looking down at her. Even his heavy tread didn't wake her. He
had shut the door in the way that was natural, and had walked across the
room in the way that was natural, for he felt no impulse in the presence
of sleep to go softly. Besides, why should she sleep in broad daylight?
Wemyss was of opinion that the night was for that. No wonder she
couldn't steep at night if she did it in the daytime. There she was,
sleeping soundly, completely indifferent to what he might be doing.
Would a really loving woman be able to do that? Would a really devoted
wife?

Then he noticed that her face, the side of it he could see, was much
swollen, and her nose was red. At least, he thought, she had had some
contrition for what she had done before going to sleep. It was to be
hoped she would wake up in a proper frame of mind. If so, even now some
of the birthday might be saved.

He took out his pipe and filled it slowly, his eyes wandering constantly
to the figure on the floor. Fancy that thing having the power to make or
mar his happiness. He could pick that much up with one hand. It looked
like twelve, with its long-stockinged relaxed legs, and its round,
short-haired head, and its swollen face of a child in a scrape. Make or
mar. He lit his pipe, repeating the phrase to himself, struck by it,
struck by the way it illuminated his position of bondage to love.

All his life, he reflected, he had only asked to be allowed to lavish
love, to make a wife happy. Look how he had loved Vera: with the utmost
devotion till she had killed it, and nothing but trouble as a reward.
Look how he loved that little thing on the floor. Passionately. And in
return, the first thing she did on being brought into his home as his
bride was to quarrel and ruin his birthday. She knew how keenly he had
looked forward to his birthday, she knew how the arrangements of the
whole honeymoon, how the very date of the wedding, had hinged on this
one day; yet she had deliberately ruined it. And having ruined it, what
did she care? Comes up here, if you please, and gets a book and goes
comfortably to sleep over it in front of the fire.

His mouth hardened still more. He pulled the arm-chair up and sat down
noisily in it, his eyes cold with resentment.

The book Lucy had been reading had dropped out of her hand when she fell
asleep, and lay open on the floor at his feet. If she used books in such
a way, Wemyss thought, he would be very careful how he let her have the
key of his bookcase. This was one of Vera's,--Vera hadn't taken any care
of her books either; she was always reading them. He slanted his head
sideways to see the title, to see what it was Lucy had considered more
worth her attention than her conduct that day towards her husband.
_Wuthering Heights_. He hadn't read it, but he fancied he had heard of
it as a morbid story. She might have been better employed, on their
first day at home, than in shutting herself away from him reading a
morbid story.

It was while he was looking at her with these thoughts stonily in his
eyes that Lucy, wakened by the smell of his pipe, opened hers. She
saw Everard sitting close to her, and had one of those moments
of instinctive happiness, of complete restoration to unshadowed
contentment, which sometimes follow immediately on waking up, before
there has been time to remember. It seems for a wonderful instant as
though all in the world were well. Doubts have vanished. Pain is gone.
And sometimes the moment continues even beyond remembrance.

It did so now with Lucy. When she opened her eyes and saw Everard, she
smiled at him a smile of perfect confidence. She had forgotten
everything. She woke up after a deep sleep and saw him, her dear love,
sitting beside her. How natural to be happy. Then, the expression on his
face bringing back remembrance, it seemed to her in that first serene
sanity, that clear-visioned moment of spirit unfretted by body, that
they had been extraordinarily silly, taking everything the other one
said and did with a tragicness....

Only love filled Lucy after the deep, restoring sleep. 'Dearest one,'
she murmured drowsily, smiling at him, without changing her position.

He said nothing to that; and presently, having woken up more, she got on
to her knees and pulled herself across to him and curled up at his feet,
her head against his knee.

He still said nothing. He waited. He would give her time. Her words had
been familiar, but not penitent. They had hardly been the right
beginning for an expression of contrition; but he would see what she
said next.

What she said next was, 'Haven't we been silly,'--and, more familiarity,
she put one arm round his knees and held them close against her face.

'We?' said Wemyss. 'Did you say we?'

'Yes,' said Lucy, her cheek against his knee. 'We've been wasting time.'

Wemyss paused before he made his comment on this. 'Really,' he then
said, 'the way you include me shows very little appreciation of your
conduct.'

'Well, _I've_ been silly then,' she said, lifting her head and smiling
up at him.

She simply couldn't go on with indignations. Perhaps they were just
ones. It didn't matter if they were. Who wanted to be in the right in a
dispute with one's lover? Everybody, oh, but everybody who loved, would
passionately want always to have been in the wrong, never, never to have
been right. That one's beloved should have been unkind,--who wanted that
to be true? Who wouldn't do anything sooner than have not been mistaken
about it? Vividly she saw Everard as he was before their marriage; so
dear, so boyish, such fun, her playmate. She could say anything to him
then. She had been quite fearless. And vividly, too, she saw him as he
was when first they met, both crushed by death,--how he had comforted
her, how he had been everything that was wonderful and tender. All that
had happened since, all that had happened on this particular and most
unfortunate day, was only a sort of excess of boyishness: boyishness on
its uncontrolled side, a wave, a fit of bad temper provoked by her not
having held on to her impulses. That locking her out in the rain,--a
schoolboy might have done that to another schoolboy. It meant nothing,
except that he was angry. That about sexual allure----oh, well.

'I've been very silly,' she said earnestly.

He looked down at her in silence. He wanted more than that. That wasn't
nearly enough. He wanted much more of humbleness before he could bring
himself to lift her on to his knee, forgiven. And how much he wanted her
on his knee.

'Do you realise what you've done?' he asked.

'Yes,' said Lucy. 'And I'm so sorry. Won't we kiss and be friends?'

'Not yet, thank you. I must be sure first that you understand how
deliberately wicked you've been.'

'Oh, but I haven't been deliberately wicked!' exclaimed Lucy, opening
her eyes wide with astonishment. 'Everard, how can you say such a
thing?'

'Ah, I see. You are still quite impenitent, and I am sorry I came up.'

He undid her arm from round his knees, put her on one side, and got out
of the chair. Rage swept over him again.

'Here I've been sitting watching you like a dog,' he said, towering over
her, 'like a faithful dog while you slept, waiting patiently till you
woke up and only wanting to forgive you, and you not only callously
sleep after having behaved outrageously and allowed yourself to exhibit
temper before the whole house on our very first day together in my
home--well knowing, mind you, what day it is--but when I ask you for
some sign, some word, some assurance that you are ashamed of yourself
and will not repeat your conduct, you merely deny that you have done
anything needing forgiveness.'

He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, his face twitching with anger, and
wished to God he could knock the opposition out of Lucy as easily.

She, on the floor, sat looking up at him, her mouth open. What could she
do with Everard? She didn't know. Love had no effect; saying she was
sorry had no effect.

She pushed her hair nervously behind her ears with both hands. 'I'm sick
of quarrels,' she said.

'So am I,' said Wemyss, going towards the door thrusting his pipe into
his pocket. 'You've only got yourself to thank for them.'

She didn't protest. It seemed useless. She said, 'Forgive me, Everard.'

'Only if you apologise.'

'Yes.'

'Yes what?' He paused for her answer.

'I do apologise.'

'You admit you've been deliberately wicked?'

'Oh yes.'

He continued towards the door.

She scrambled to her feet and ran after him. 'Please don't go,' she
begged, catching his arm. 'You know I can't bear it, I can't bear it if
we quarrel----'

'Then what do you mean by saying "Oh yes," in that insolent manner?'

'Did it seem insolent? I didn't mean--oh, I'm so tired of this----'

'I daresay. You'll be tireder still before you've done. _I_ don't get
tired, let me tell you. You can go on as long as you choose,--it won't
affect me.'

'Oh do, do let's be friends. I don't want to go on. I don't want
anything in the world except to be friends. Please kiss me, Everard, and
say you forgive me----'

He at least stood still and looked at her.

'And do believe I'm so, so sorry----'

He relented. He wanted, extraordinarily, to kiss her. 'I'll accept it if
you assure me it is so,' he said.

'And do, do let's be happy. It's your birthday----'

'As though I've forgotten that.'

He looked at her upturned face; her arm was round his neck now. 'Lucy, I
don't believe you understand my love for you,' he said solemnly.

'No,' said Lucy truthfully, 'I don't think I do.'

'You'll have to learn.'

'Yes,' said Lucy; and sighed faintly.

'You mustn't wound such love.'

'No,' said Lucy. 'Don't let us wound each other ever any more, darling
Everard.'

'I'm not talking of each other. I'm talking at this moment of myself in
relation to you. One thing at a time, please.'

'Yes,' said Lucy. 'Kiss me, won't you, Everard? Else I shan't know we're
really friends.'

He took her head in his hands, and bestowed a solemn kiss of pardon on
her brow.

She tried to coax him back to cheerfulness. 'Kiss my eyes too,' she
said, smiling at him, 'or they'll feel neglected.'

He kissed her eyes.

'And now my mouth, please, Everard.'

He kissed her mouth, and did at last smile.

'And now won't we go to the fire and be cosy?' she asked, her arm in
his.

'By the way, who ordered the fire?' he inquired in his ordinary voice.

'I don't know. It was lit when I came up. Oughtn't it to have been?'

'Not without orders. It must have been that Lizzie. I'll ring and find
out----'

'Oh, don't ring!' exclaimed Lucy, catching his hand,--she felt she
couldn't bear any more ringing. 'If you do she'll come, and I want us to
be alone together.'

'Well, whose fault is it we haven't been alone together all this time?'
he asked.

'Ah, but we're friends now--you mustn't go back to that any more,' she
said, anxiously smiling and drawing his hand through her arm.

He allowed her to lead him to the arm-chair, and sitting in it did at
last feel justified in taking her on his knee.

'How my own Love spoils things,' he said, shaking his head at her with
fond solemnity when they were settled in the chair.

And Lucy, very cautious now, only said gently, 'But I never _mean_ to.'



XXIII


She sat after that without speaking on his knee, his arms round her, her
head on his breast.

She was thinking.

Try as she might to empty herself of everything except acceptance and
love, she found that only her body was controllable. That lay quite
passive in Wemyss's arms; but her mind refused to lie passive, it would
think. Strange how tightly one's body could be held, how close to
somebody else's heart, and yet one wasn't anywhere near the holder. They
locked you up in prisons that way, holding your body tight and thinking
they had got you, and all the while your mind--you--was as free as the
wind and the sunlight. She couldn't help it, she struggled hard to feel
as she had felt when she woke up and saw him sitting near her; but the
way he had refused to be friends, the complete absence of any readiness
in him to meet her, not half, nor even a quarter, but a little bit of
the way, had for the first time made her consciously afraid of him.

She was afraid of him, and she was afraid of herself in relation to him.
He seemed outside anything of which she had experience. He appeared not
to be--he anyhow had not been that day--generous. There seemed no way,
at any point, by which one could reach him. What was he _really_ like?
How long was it going to take her really to know him? Years? And she
herself,--she now knew, now that she had made their acquaintance, that
she couldn't at all bear scenes. Any scenes. Either with herself, or in
her presence with other people. She couldn't bear them while they were
going on, and she couldn't bear the exhaustion of the long drawn-out
making up at the end. And she not only didn't see how they were to be
avoided--for no care, no caution would for ever be able to watch what
she said, or did, or looked, or, equally important, what she didn't say,
or didn't do, or didn't look--but she was afraid, afraid with a most
dismal foreboding, that some day after one of them, or in the middle of
one of them, her nerve would give out and she would collapse. Collapse
deplorably; into just something that howled and whimpered.

This, however, was horrible. She mustn't think like this. Sufficient
unto the day, she thought, trying to make herself smile, is the
whimpering thereof. Besides, she wouldn't whimper, she wouldn't go to
pieces, she would discover a way to manage. Where there was so much love
there must be a way to manage.

He had pulled her blouse back, and was kissing her shoulder and asking
her whose very own wife she was. But what was the good of love-making if
it was immediately preceded or followed or interrupted by anger? She was
afraid of him. She wasn't in this kissing at all. Perhaps she had been
afraid of him unconsciously for a long while. What was that abjectness
on the honeymoon, that anxious desire to please, to avoid offending, but
fear? It was love afraid; afraid of getting hurt, of not going to be
able to believe whole-heartedly, of not going to be able--this was the
worst--to be proud of its beloved. But now, after her experiences
to-day, she had a fear of him more separate, more definite, distinct
from love. Strange to be afraid of him and love him at the same time.
Perhaps if she didn't love him she wouldn't be afraid of him. No, she
didn't think she would then, because then nothing that he said would
reach her heart. Only she couldn't imagine that. He _was_ her heart.

'What are you thinking of?' asked Wemyss, who having finished with her
shoulder noticed how quiet she was.

She could tell him truthfully; a moment sooner and she couldn't have. 'I
was thinking,' she said, 'that you are my heart.'

'Take care of your heart then, won't you?' said Wemyss.

'We both will,' said Lucy.

'Of course,' said Wemyss. 'That's understood. Why state it?'

She was silent a minute. Then she said, 'Isn't it nearly tea-time?'

'By Jove, yes,' he exclaimed, pulling out his watch. 'Why, long past. I
wonder what that fool--get up, little Love--' he brushed her off his
lap--'I'll ring and find out what she means by it.'

Lucy was sorry she had said anything about tea. However, he didn't keep
his finger on the bell this time, but rang it normally. Then he stood
looking at his watch.

She put her arm through his. She longed to say, 'Please don't scold
her.'

'Take care,' he said, his eyes on his watch. 'Don't shake me----'

She asked what he was doing.

'Timing her,' he said. 'Sh--sh--don't talk. I can't keep count if you
talk.'

She became breathlessly quiet and expectant. She listened anxiously for
the sound of footsteps. She did hope Lizzie would come in time. Lizzie
was so nice,--it would be dreadful if she got a scolding. Why didn't she
come? There--what was that? A door going somewhere. Would she do it?
Would she?

Running steps came along the passage outside. Wemyss put his watch away.
'Five seconds to spare,' he said. 'That's the way to teach them to
answer bells,' he added with satisfaction.

'Did you ring, sir?' inquired Lizzie, opening the door.

'Why is tea late?'

'It's in the library, sir.'

'Kindly attend to my question. I asked why tea was late.'

'It wasn't late to begin with, sir,' said Lizzie.

'Be so good as to make yourself clear.'

Lizzie, who had felt quite clear, here became befogged. She did her
best, however. 'It's got late through waiting to be 'ad, sir,' she said.

'I'm afraid I don't follow you. Do you?' he asked, turning to Lucy.

She started. 'Yes,' she said.

'Really. Then you are cleverer than I am,' said Wemyss.

Lizzie at this--for she didn't want to make any more trouble for the
young lady--made a further effort to explain. 'It was punctual in the
library, sir, at 'alf-past four if you'd been there to 'ave it. The tea
was punctual, sir, but there wasn't no one to 'ave it.'

'And pray by whose orders was it in the library?'

'I couldn't say, sir. Chesterton----'

'Don't put it on to Chesterton.'

'I was thinking,' said Lizzie, who was more stout-hearted than the
parlourmaid and didn't take cover quite so frequently in dumbness, 'I
was thinking p'raps Chesterton knew. I don't do the tea, sir.'

'Send Chesterton,' said Wemyss.

Lizzie disappeared with the quickness of relief. Lucy, with a nervous
little movement, stooped and picked up _Wuthering Heights_, which was
still lying face downward on the floor.

'Yes,' said Wemyss. 'I like the way you treat books.'

She put it back on its shelf. 'I went to sleep, and it fell down,' she
said. 'Everard,' she went on quickly, 'I must go and get a handkerchief.
I'll join you in the library.'

'I'm not going into the library. I'm going to have tea here. Why should
I have tea in the library?'

'I only thought as it was there----'

'I suppose I can have tea where I like in my own house?'

'But of course. Well, then, I'll go and get a handkerchief and come back
here.'

'You can do that some other time. Don't be so restless.'

'But I--I _want_ a handkerchief this minute,' said Lucy.

'Nonsense; here, have mine,' said Wemyss; and anyhow it was too late to
escape, for there in the door stood Chesterton.

She was the parlourmaid. Her name has not till now been mentioned. It
was Chesterton.

'Why is tea in the library?' Wemyss asked.

'I understood, sir, tea was always to be in the library,' said
Chesterton.

'That was while I was by myself. I suppose it wouldn't have occurred to
you to inquire whether I still wished it there now that I am not by
myself.'

This floored Chesterton. Her ignorance of the right answer was complete.
She therefore said nothing, and merely stood.

But he didn't let her off. 'Would it?' he asked suddenly.

'No sir,' she said, dimly feeling that 'Yes sir' would land her in
difficulties.

'No. Quite so. It wouldn't. Well, you will now go and fetch that tea and
bring it up here. Stop a minute, stop a minute--don't be in such a
hurry, please. How long has it been made?'

'Since half-past four, sir.'

'Then you will make fresh tea, and you will make fresh toast, and you
will cut fresh bread and butter.'

'Yes sir.'

'And another time you will have the goodness to ascertain my wishes
before taking upon yourself to put the tea into any room you choose to
think fit.'

'Yes sir.'

She waited.

He waved.

She went.

'That'll teach her,' said Wemyss, looking refreshed by the encounter.
'If she thinks she's going to get out of bringing tea up here by putting
it ready somewhere else she'll find she's mistaken. Aren't they a set?
_Aren't_ they a set, little Love?'

'I--don't know,' said Lucy nervously.

'You don't know!'

'I mean, I don't know them yet. How can I know them when I've only just
come?'

'You soon will, then. A lazier set of careless, lying----'

'Do tell me what that picture is, Everard,' she interrupted, quickly
crossing the room and standing in front of it. 'I've been wondering and
wondering.'

'You can see what it is. It's a picture.'

'Yes. But where's the place?'

'I've no idea. It's one of Vera's. She didn't condescend to explain it.'

'You mean she painted it?'

'I daresay. She was always painting.'

Wemyss, who had been filling his pipe, lit it and stood smoking in front
of the fire, occasionally looking at his watch, while Lucy stared at the
picture. Lovely, lovely to run through that door out into the open, into
the warmth and sunshine, further and further away....

It was the only picture in the room; indeed, the room was oddly bare,--a
thin room, with no carpet on its slippery floor, only some infrequent
rugs, and no curtains. But there had been curtains, for there were the
rods with rings on them, so that somebody must have taken Vera's
curtains away. Lucy had been strangely perturbed when she noticed this.
It was Vera's room. Her curtains oughtn't to have been touched.

The long wall opposite the fireplace had nothing at all on its
sand-coloured surface from the door to the window except a tall narrow
looking-glass in a queerly-carved black frame, and the picture. But how
that one picture glowed. What glorious weather they were having in it!
It wasn't anywhere in England, she was sure. It was a brilliant, sunlit
place, with a lot of almond trees in full blossom,--an orchard of them,
apparently, standing in grass that was full of little flowers, very gay
little flowers, of kinds she didn't know. And through the open door in
the wall there was an amazing stretch of hot, vivid country. It
stretched on and on till it melted into an ever so far away lovely blue.
There was an effect of immense spaciousness, of huge freedom. One could
feel oneself running out into it with one's face to the sun, flinging up
one's arms in an ecstasy of release, of escape....

'It's somewhere abroad,' she said, after a silence.

'I daresay,' said Wemyss.

'Used you to travel much?' she asked, still examining the picture,
fascinated.

'She refused to.'

'She refused to?' echoed Lucy, turning round.

She looked at him wonderingly. That seemed not only unkind of Vera, but
extraordinarily--yes, energetic. The exertion required for refusing
Everard something he wanted was surely enormous, was surely greater than
any but the most robust-minded wife could embark upon. She had had one
small experience of what disappointing him meant in that question of
Christmas, and she hadn't been living with him then, and she had had all
the nights to recover in; yet the effect of that one experience had been
to make her give in at once when next he wanted something, and it was
because of last Christmas that she was standing married in that room
instead of being still, as both she and her Aunt Dot had intended, six
months off it.

'Why did she refuse?' she asked, wondering.

Wemyss didn't answer for a moment. Then he said, 'I was going to say you
had better ask her, but you can't very well do that, can you.'

Lucy stood looking at him. 'Yes,' she said, 'she does seem
extraordinarily near, doesn't she. This room is full----'

'Now Lucy I'll have none of that. Come here.'

He held out his hand. She crossed over obediently and took it.

He pulled her close and ruffled her hair. He was in high spirits again.
His encounters with the servants had exhilarated him.

'Who's my duddely-umpty little girl?' he asked. 'Tell me who's my
duddely-umpty little girl. Quick. Tell me----' And he caught her round
the waist and jumped her up and down.

Chesterton, bringing in the tea, arrived in the middle of a jump.



XXIV


There appeared to be no tea-table. Chesterton, her arms stretched taut
holding the heavy tray, looked round. Evidently tea up there wasn't
usual.

'Put it in the window,' said Wemyss, jerking his head towards the
writing-table.

'Oh----' began Lucy quickly; and stopped.

'What's the matter?' asked Wemyss.

'Won't it--be draughty?'

'Nonsense. Draughty. Do you suppose I'd tolerate windows in my house
that let in draughts?'

Chesterton, resting a corner of the tray on the table, was sweeping a
clear space for it with her hand. Not that much sweeping was needed, for
the table was big and all that was on it was the notepaper which earlier
in the afternoon had been scattered on the floor, a rusty pen or two,
some pencils whose ends had been gnawed as the pencils of a child at its
lessons are gnawed, a neglected-looking inkpot, and a grey book with
_Household Accounts_ in dark lettering on its cover.

Wemyss watched her while she arranged the tea-things.

'Take care, now--take care,' he said, when a cup rattled in its saucer.

Chesterton, who had been taking care, took more of it; and _le trop_
being _l'ennemi du bien_ she was so unfortunate as to catch her cuff in
the edge of the plate of bread and butter.

The plate tilted up; the bread and butter slid off; and only by a
practised quick movement did she stop the plate from following the bread
and butter and smashing itself on the floor.

'There now,' said Wemyss. 'See what you've done. Didn't I tell you to be
careful? It isn't,' he said, turning to Lucy, 'as if I hadn't _told_ her
to be careful.'

Chesterton, on her knees, was picking up the bread and butter which
lay--a habit she had observed in bread and butter under circumstances of
this kind--butter downwards.

'You will fetch a cloth,' said Wemyss.

'Yes sir.'

'And you will cut more bread and butter.'

'Yes sir.'

'That makes two plates of bread and butter wasted to-day entirely owing
to your carelessness. They shall be stopped out of your----Lucy, where
are you going?'

'To fetch a handkerchief. I must have a handkerchief, Everard. I can't
for ever use yours.'

'You'll do nothing of the kind. Lizzie will bring you one. Come back at
once. I won't have you running in and out of the room the whole time. I
never knew any one so restless. Ring the bell and tell Lizzie to get you
one. What is she for, I should like to know?'

He then resumed and concluded his observations to Chesterton. 'They
shall be stopped out of your wages. That,' he said, 'will teach you.'

And Chesterton, who was used to this, and had long ago arranged with the
cook that such stoppages should be added on to the butcher's book, said,
'Yes sir.'

When she had gone--or rather withdrawn, for a plain word like gone
doesn't justly describe the noiseless decorum with which Chesterton
managed the doors of her entrances and exits--and when Lizzie, too, had
gone after bringing a handkerchief, Lucy supposed they would now have
tea; she supposed the moment had at last arrived for her to go and sit
in that window.

The table was at right angles to it, so that sitting at it you had
nothing between one side of you and the great pane of glass that reached
nearly to the floor. You could look sheer down on to the flags below.
She thought it horrible, gruesome to have tea there, and the very first
day, before she had had a moment's time to get used to things. Such
detachment on the part of Everard was either just stark wonderful--she
had already found noble explanations for it--or it was so callous that
she had no explanation for it at all; none, that is, that she dared
think of. Once more she decided that his way was really the best and
simplest way to meet the situation. You took the bull by the horns. You
seized the nettle. You cleared the air. And though her images, she felt,
were not what they might be, neither was anything else that day what it
might be. Everything appeared to reflect the confusion produced by
Wemyss's excessive lucidity of speech.

'Shall I pour out the tea?' she asked presently, preparing, then, to
take the bull by the horns; for he remained standing in front of the
fire smoking in silence. 'Just think,' she went on, making an effort to
be gay, 'this is the first time I shall pour out tea in my----'

She was going to say 'My own home,' but the words wouldn't come off her
tongue. Wemyss had repeatedly during the day spoken of his home, but not
once had he said 'our' or 'your'; and if ever a house didn't feel as if
it in the very least belonged, too, to her, it was this one.

'Not yet,' he said briefly.

She wondered. 'Not yet?' she repeated.

'I'm waiting for the bread and butter.'

'But won't the tea get cold?'

'No doubt. And it'll be entirely that fool's fault.'

'But----' began Lucy, after a silence.

'Buts again?'

'I was only thinking that if we had it now it wouldn't be cold.'

'She must be taught her lesson.'

Again she wondered. 'Won't it rather be a lesson to us?' she asked.

'For God's sake, Lucy, don't argue. Things have to be done properly in
my house. You've had no experience of a properly managed household. All
that set you were brought up in--why, one only had to look at them to
see what a hugger-mugger way they probably lived. It's entirely the
careless fool's own fault that the tea will be cold. _I_ didn't ask her
to throw the bread and butter on the floor, did I?'

And as she said nothing, he asked again. 'Did I?' he asked.

'No,' said Lucy.

'Well then,' said Wemyss.

They waited in silence.

Chesterton arrived. She put the fresh bread and butter on the table, and
then wiped the floor with a cloth she had brought.

Wemyss watched her closely. When she had done--and Chesterton being good
at her work, scrutinise as he might he could see no sign on the floor of
overlooked butter--he said, 'You will now take the teapot down and bring
some hot tea.'

'Yes sir,' said Chesterton, removing the teapot.

A line of a hymn her nurse used to sing came into Lucy's head when she
saw the teapot going. It was:

     What various hindrances we meet--

and she thought the next line, which she didn't remember, must have
been:

     Before at tea ourselves we seat.

But though one portion of her mind was repeating this with nervous
levity, the other was full of concern for the number of journeys up and
down all those stairs the parlourmaid was being obliged to make. It
was--well, thoughtless of Everard to make her go up and down so often.
Probably he didn't realise--of course he didn't--how very many stairs
there were. When and how could she talk to him about things like this?
When would he be in such a mood that she would be able to do so without
making them worse? And how, in what words sufficiently tactful,
sufficiently gentle, would she be able to avoid his being offended? She
must manage somehow. But tact--management--prudence--all these she had
not yet in her life needed. Had she the smallest natural gift for them?
Besides, each of them applied to love seemed to her an insult. She had
supposed that love, real love, needed none of these protections. She had
thought it was a simple, sturdy growth that could stand anything....
Why, here was the parlourmaid already, teapot and all. How very quick
she had been!

Chesterton, however, hadn't so much been quick as tactful, managing, and
prudent. She had been practising these qualities on the other side of
the door, whither she had taken the teapot and quietly waited with it a
few minutes, and whence she now brought it back. She placed it on the
table with admirable composure; and when Wemyss, on her politely asking
whether there were anything else he required, said, 'Yes. You will now
take away that toast and bring fresh,' she took the toast also only as
far as the other side of the door, and waited with it there a little.

Lucy now hoped they would have tea. 'Shall I pour it out?' she asked
after a moment a little anxiously, for he still didn't move and she
began to be afraid the toast might be going to be the next hindrance; in
which case they would go round and round for the rest of the day, never
catching up the tea at all.

But he did go over and sit down at the table, followed by her who hardly
now noticed its position, so much surprised and absorbed was she by his
methods of housekeeping.

'Isn't it monstrous,' he said, sitting down heavily, 'how we've been
kept waiting for such a simple thing as tea. I tell you they're the most
slovenly----'

There was Chesterton again, bearing the toast-rack balanced on the tip
of a respectful ringer.

This time even Lucy realised that it must be the same toast, and her
hand, lifted in the act of pouring out tea, trembled, for she feared the
explosion that was bound to come.

How extraordinary. There was no explosion. Everard hadn't--it seemed
incredible--noticed. His attention was so much fixed on what she was
doing with his cup, he was watching her so carefully lest she should
fill it a hair's-breadth fuller than he liked, that all he said to
Chesterton as she put the toast on the table was, 'Let this be a lesson
to you.' But there was no gusto in it; it was quite mechanical.

'Yes sir,' said Chesterton.

She waited.

He waved.

She went.

The door hadn't been shut an instant before Wemyss exclaimed, 'Why, if
that slovenly hussy hasn't forgotten----' And too much incensed to
continue he stared at the tea-tray.

'What? What?' asked Lucy startled, also staring at the tea-tray.

'Why, the sugar.'

'Oh, I'll call her back--she's only just gone----'

'Sit down, Lucy.'

'But she's just outside----'

'Sit _down_, I tell you.'

Lucy sat.

Then she remembered that neither she nor Everard ever had sugar in their
tea, so naturally there was no point in calling Chesterton back.

'Oh, of course,' she said, smiling nervously, for what with one thing
and another she was feeling shattered, 'how stupid of me. We don't want
sugar.'

Wemyss said nothing. He was studying his watch, timing Chesterton. Then
when the number of seconds needed to reach the kitchen had run out, he
got up and rang the bell.

In due course Lizzie appeared. It seemed that the rule was that this
particular bell should be answered by Lizzie.

'Chesterton,' said Wemyss.

In due course Chesterton appeared. She was less composed than when she
brought back the teapot, than when she brought back the toast. She tried
to hide it, but she was out of breath.

'Yes sir?' she said.

Wemyss took no notice, and went on drinking his tea.

Chesterton stood.

After a period of silence Lucy thought that perhaps it was expected of
her as mistress of the house to tell her about the sugar; but then as
they neither of them wanted any....

After a further period of silence, during which she anxiously debated
whether it was this that they were all waiting for, she thought that
perhaps Everard hadn't heard the parlourmaid come in; so she said--she
was ashamed to hear how timidly it came out--'Chesterton is here,
Everard.'

He took no notice, and went on eating bread and butter.

After a further period of anxious inward debate she concluded that it
must after all be expected of her, as mistress of the house, to talk of
the sugar; and the sugar was to be talked of not because they needed it
but on principle. But what a roundabout way; how fatiguing and
difficult. Why didn't Everard say what he wanted, instead of leaving her
to guess?

'I think----' she stammered, flushing, for she was now very timid
indeed, 'you've forgotten the sugar, Chesterton.'

'Will you not interfere!' exclaimed Wemyss very loud, putting down his
cup with a bang.

The flush on Lucy's face vanished as if it had been knocked out. She sat
quite still. If she moved, or looked anywhere but at her plate, she knew
she would begin to cry. The scenes she had dreaded had not included any
with herself in the presence of servants. It hadn't entered her head
that these, too, were possible. She must hold on to herself; not move;
not look. She sat absorbed in that one necessity, fiercely concentrated.
Chesterton must have gone away and come back again, for presently she
was aware that sugar was being put on the tea-tray; and then she was
aware that Everard was holding out his cup.

'Give me some more tea, please,' he said, 'and for God's sake don't
sulk. If the servants forget their duties it's neither your nor my
business to tell them what they've forgotten,--they've just got to look
and see, and if they don't see they've just got to stand there looking
till they do. It's the only way to teach them. But for you to get
sulking on the top of it----'

She lifted the teapot with both hands, because one hand by itself too
obviously shook. She succeeded in pouring out the tea without spilling
it, and in stopping almost at the very moment when he said, 'Take care,
take care--you're filling it too full.' She even succeeded after a
minute or two in saying, holding carefully on to her voice to keep it
steady, 'I'm not--sulking. I've--got a headache.'

And she thought desperately, 'The only thing to be done with marriage is
to let it wash over one.'



XXV


For the rest of that day she let it wash; unresistingly. She couldn't
think any more. She couldn't feel any more,--not that day. She really
had a headache; and when the dusk came, and Wemyss turned on the lights,
it was evident even to him that she had, for there was no colour at all
in her face and her eyes were puffed and leaden.

He had one of his sudden changes. 'Come here,' he said, reaching out and
drawing her on to his knee; and he held her face against his breast, and
felt full of maternal instincts, and crooned over her. 'Was it a poor
little baby,' he crooned. 'Did it have a headache then----' And he put
his great cool hand on her hot forehead and kept it there.

Lucy gave up trying to understand anything at all any more. These swift
changes,--she couldn't keep up with them; she was tired, tired....

They sat like that in the chair before the fire, Wemyss holding his hand
on her forehead and feeling full of maternal instincts, and she an
unresisting blank, till he suddenly remembered he hadn't shown her the
drawing-room yet. The afternoon had not proceeded on the lines laid down
for it in his plans, but if they were quick there was still time for the
drawing-room before dinner.

Accordingly she was abruptly lifted off his knee. 'Come along, little
Love,' he said briskly. 'Come along. Wake up. I want to show you
something.'

And the next thing she knew was that she was going downstairs, and
presently she found herself standing in a big cold room, blinking in the
bright lights he had switched on at the door.

'This,' he said, holding her by the arm, 'is the drawing-room. Isn't it
a fine room.' And he explained the piano, and told her how he had found
a button off, and he pointed out the roll of rugs in a distant corner
which, unrolled, decorated the parquet floor, and he drew her attention
to the curtains,--he had no objections to curtains in a drawing-room, he
said, because a drawing-room was anyhow a room of concessions; and he
asked her at the end, as he had asked her at the beginning, if she
didn't think it a fine room.

Lucy said it was a very fine room.

'You'll remember to put the cover on properly when you've finished
playing the piano, won't you,' he said.

'Yes I will,' said Lucy. 'Only I don't play,' she added, remembering she
didn't.

'That's all right then,' he said, relieved.

They were still standing admiring the proportions of the room, its
marble fireplace and the brilliancy of its lighting--'The test of good
lighting,' said Wemyss, 'is that there shouldn't be a corner of a room
in which a man of eighty can't read his newspaper'--when the gong began.

'Good Lord,' he said, looking at his watch, 'it'll be dinner in ten
minutes. Why, we've had nothing at all of the afternoon, and I'd planned
to show you so many things. Ah,' he said, turning and shaking his head
at her, his voice changing to sorrow, 'whose fault has that been?'

'Mine,' said Lucy.

He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face, gazing at it and
shaking his head slowly. The light, streaming into her swollen eyes,
hurt them and made her blink.

'Ah, my Lucy,' he said fondly, 'little waster of happiness--isn't it
better simply to love your Everard than make him unhappy?'

'Much better,' said Lucy, blinking.

There was no dressing for dinner at The Willows, for that, explained
Wemyss, was the great joy of home, that you needn't ever do anything you
don't want to in it, and therefore, he said, ten minutes' warning was
ample for just washing one's hands. They washed their hands together in
the big bedroom, because Wemyss disapproved of dressing-rooms at home
even more strongly than on honeymoons in hotels. 'Nobody's going to
separate me from my own woman,' he said, drying his hands and eyeing her
with proud possessiveness while she dried hers; their basins stood side
by side on the brown mottled marble of the washstand. 'Are they,' he
said, as she dried in silence.

'No,' said Lucy.

'How's the head?' he said.

'Better,' she said.

'Who's got a forgiving husband?' he said.

'I have,' she said.

'Smile at me,' he said.

She smiled at him.

At dinner it was Vera who smiled, her changeless little strangled smile,
with her eyes on Lucy. Lucy's seat had its back to Vera, but she knew
she had only to turn her head to see her eyes fixed on her, smiling. No
one else smiled; only Vera.

Lucy bent her head over her plate, trying to escape the unshaded light
that beat down on her eyes, sore with crying, and hurt. In front of her
was the bowl of kingcups, the birthday flowers. Just behind Wemyss stood
Chesterton, in an attitude of strained attention. Dimly through Lucy's
head floated thoughts: Seeing that Everard invariably spent his
birthdays at The Willows, on that day last year at that hour Vera was
sitting where she, Lucy, now was, with the kingcups glistening in front
of her, and Everard tucking his table napkin into his waistcoat, and
Chesterton waiting till he was quite ready to take the cover off the
soup; just as Lucy was seeing these things this year Vera saw them last
year; Vera still had three months of life ahead of her then, three more
months of dinners, and Chesterton, and Everard tucking in his napkin.
How queer. What a dream it all was. On that last of his birthdays at
which Vera would ever be present, did any thought of his next birthday
cross her mind? How strange it would have seemed to her if she could
have seen ahead, and seen her, Lucy, sitting in her chair. The same
chair; everything just the same; except the wife. '_Souvent femme
varie_,' floated vaguely across her tired brain. She ate her soup
sitting all crooked with fatigue ... life was exactly like a dream....

Wemyss, absorbed in the scrutiny of his food and the behaviour of
Chesterton, had no time to notice anything Lucy might be doing. It was
the rule that Chesterton, at meals, should not for an instant leave the
room. The furthest she was allowed was a door in the dark corner
opposite the door into the hall, through which at intervals Lizzie's arm
thrust dishes. It was the rule that Lizzie shouldn't come into the room,
but, stationary on the other side of this door, her function was to
thrust dishes through it; and to her from the kitchen, pattering
ceaselessly to and fro, came the tweeny bringing the dishes. This had
all been thought out and arranged very carefully years ago by Wemyss,
and ought to have worked without a hitch; but sometimes there were
hitches, and Lizzie's arm was a minute late thrusting in a dish. When
this happened Chesterton, kept waiting and conscious of Wemyss
enormously waiting at the end of the table, would put her head round the
door and hiss at Lizzie, who then hurried to the kitchen and hissed at
the tweeny, who for her part didn't dare hiss at the cook.

To-night, however, nothing happened that was not perfect. From the way
Chesterton had behaved about the tea, and the way Lizzie had behaved
about the window, Wemyss could see that during his four weeks' absence
his household had been getting out of hand, and he was therefore more
watchful than ever, determined to pass nothing over. On this occasion he
watched in vain. Things went smoothly from start to finish. The tweeny
ran, Lizzie thrust, Chesterton deposited, dead on time. Every dish was
hot and punctual, or cold and punctual, according to what was expected
of it; and Wemyss going out of the dining-room at the end, holding Lucy
by the arm, couldn't but feel he had dined very well. Perhaps, though,
his father's photograph hadn't been dusted,--it would be just like them
to have disregarded his instructions. He went back to look, and Lucy,
since he was holding her by the arm, went too. No, they had even done
that; and there was nothing further to be said except, with great
sternness to Chesterton, eyeing her threateningly, 'Coffee at once.'

The evening was spent in the library reading Wemyss's school reports,
and looking at photographs of him in his various stages,--naked and
crowing; with ringlets, in a frock; in knickerbockers, holding a hoop; a
stout schoolboy; a tall and slender youth; thickening; still thickening;
thick,--and they went to bed at ten o'clock.

Somewhere round midnight Lucy discovered that the distances of the
treble bed softened sound; either that, or she was too tired to hear
anything, for she dropped out of consciousness with the heaviness of a
released stone.

Next day it was finer. There were gleams of sun; and though the wind
still blew, the rain held off except for occasional spatterings. They
got up very late--breakfast on Sundays at The Willows was not till
eleven--and went and inspected the chickens. By the time they had done
that, and walked round the garden, and stood on the edge of the river
throwing sticks into it and watching the pace at which they were whirled
away on its muddy and disturbed surface, it was luncheon time. After
luncheon they walked along the towpath, one behind the other because it
was narrow and the grass at the sides was wet. Wemyss walked slowly, and
the wind was cold. Lucy kept close to his heels, seeking shelter under,
as it were, his lee. Talk wasn't possible because of the narrow path and
the blustering wind, but every now and then Wemyss looked down over his
shoulder at her. 'Still there?' he asked; and Lucy said she was.

They had tea punctually at half-past four up in Vera's sitting-room, but
without, this time, a fire--Wemyss had rectified Lizzie's tendency to be
officious--and after tea he took her out again to show her how his
electricity was made, while the gardener who saw to the machinery, and
the boy who saw to the gardener, stood by in attendance.

There was a cold sunset,--a narrow strip of gold below heavy clouds,
like a sullen, half-open eye. The prudent cows dotted the fields
motionlessly, lying on their dry bite of grass. The wind blew straight
across from the sunset through Lucy's coat, wrap herself in it as
tightly as she might, while they loitered among outhouses and examined
the durability of the railings. Her headache, in spite of her good
night, hadn't gone, and by dinner time her throat felt sore. She said
nothing to Wemyss, because she was sure she would be well in the
morning. Her colds never lasted. Besides she knew, for he had often told
her, how much he was bored by the sick.

At dinner her cheeks were very red and her eyes very bright.

'Who's my pretty little girl,' said Wemyss, struck by her.

Indeed he was altogether pleased with her. She had been his own Lucy
throughout the day, so gentle and sweet, and hadn't once said But, or
tried to go out of rooms. Unquestioningly acquiescent she had been; and
now so pretty, with the light full on her, showing up her lovely
colouring.

'Who's my pretty little girl,' he said again, laying his hand on hers,
while Chesterton looked down her nose.

Then he noticed she had a knitted scarf round her shoulders, and he
said, 'Whatever have you got that thing on in here for?'

'I'm cold,' said Lucy.

'Cold! Nonsense. You're as warm as a toast. Feel my hand compared to
yours.'

Then she did tell him she thought she had caught cold, and he said,
withdrawing his hand and his face falling, 'Well, if you have it's only
what you deserve when you recollect what you did yesterday.'

'I suppose it is,' agreed Lucy; and assured him her colds were all over
in twenty-four hours.

Afterwards in the library when they were alone, she asked if she hadn't
better sleep by herself in case he caught her cold, but Wemyss wouldn't
hear of such a thing. Not only, he said, he never caught colds and
didn't believe any one else who was sensible ever did, but it would take
more than a cold to separate him from his wife. Besides, though of
course she richly deserved a cold after yesterday--'Who's a shameless
little baggage,' he said, pinching her ear, 'coming down with only a
blanket on----' somehow, though he had been so angry at the time, the
recollection of that pleased him--he could see no signs of her having
got one. She didn't sneeze, she didn't blow her nose----

Lucy agreed, and said she didn't suppose it was anything really, and she
was sure she would be all right in the morning.

'Yes--and you know we catch the early train up,' said Wemyss. 'Leave
here at nine sharp, mind.'

'Yes,' said Lucy. And presently, for she was feeling very uncomfortable
and hot and cold in turns, and had a great longing to creep away and be
alone for a little while, she said that perhaps, although she knew it
was very early, she had better go to bed.

'All right,' said Wemyss, getting up briskly. 'I'll come too.'



XXVI


He found her, however, very trying that night, the way she would keep on
turning round, and it reached such a pitch of discomfort to sleep with
her, or rather endeavour to sleep with her, for as the night went on she
paid less and less attention to his requests that she should keep still,
that at about two o'clock, staggering with sleepiness, he got up and
went into a spare room, trailing the quilt after him and carrying his
pillows, and finished the night in peace.

When he woke at seven he couldn't make out at first where he was, nor
why, on stretching out his arm, he found no wife to be gathered in. Then
he remembered, and he felt most injured that he should have been turned
out of his own bed. If Lucy imagined she was going to be allowed to
develop the same restlessness at night that was characteristic of her by
day, she was mistaken; and he got up to go and tell her so.

He found her asleep in a very untidy position, the clothes all dragged
over to her side of the bed and pulled up round her. He pulled them back
again, and she woke up, and he got into bed and said, 'Come here,'
stretching out his arm, and she didn't come.

Then he looked at her more closely, and she, looking at him with heavy
eyes, said something husky. It was evident she had a very tiresome cold.

'What an untruth you told me,' he exclaimed, 'about not having a cold in
the morning!'

She again said something husky. It was evident she had a very tiresome
sore throat.

'It's getting on for half-past seven,' said Wemyss. 'We've got to leave
the house at nine sharp, mind.'

Was it possible that she wouldn't leave the house at nine sharp? The
thought that she wouldn't was too exasperating to consider. He go up to
London alone? On this the first occasion of going up after his marriage?
He be alone in Lancaster Gate, just as if he hadn't a wife at all? What
was the good of a wife if she didn't go up to London with one? And all
this to come upon him because of her conduct on his birthday.

'Well,' he said, sitting up in bed and looking down at her, 'I hope
you're pleased with the result of your behaviour.'

But it was no use saying things to somebody who merely made husky
noises.

He got out of bed and jerked up the blinds. 'Such a beautiful day, too,'
he said indignantly.

When at a quarter to nine the station cab arrived, he went up to the
bedroom hoping that he would find her after all dressed and sensible and
ready to go, but there she was just as he had left her when he went to
have his breakfast, dozing and inert in the tumbled bed.

'You'd better follow me by the afternoon train,' he said, after staring
down at her in silence. 'I'll tell the cab. But in any case,' he said,
as she didn't answer, 'in _any_ case, Lucy, I expect you to-morrow.'

She opened her eyes and looked at him languidly.

'Do you hear?' he said.

She made a husky noise.

'Good-bye,' he said shortly, stooping and giving the top of her head a
brief, disgusted kiss. The way the consequences of folly fell always on
somebody else and punished him.... Wemyss could hardly give his _Times_
the proper attention in the train for thinking of it.

That day Miss Entwhistle, aware of the return from the honeymoon on the
Friday, and of the week-end to be spent at The Willows, and of the
coming up to Lancaster Gate early on the Monday morning for the inside
of the week, waited till twelve o'clock, so as to allow plenty of time
for Wemyss no longer to be in the house, and then telephoned. Lucy and
she were to lunch together. Lucy had written to say so, and Miss
Entwhistle wanted to know if she wouldn't soon be round. She longed
extraordinarily to fold that darling little child in her arms again. It
seemed an eternity since she saw her radiantly disappearing in the taxi;
and the letters she had hoped to get during the honeymoon hadn't been
letters at all, but picture postcards.

A man's voice answered her,--not Wemyss's. It was, she recognised, the
voice of the pale servant, who with his wife attended to the Lancaster
Gate house. They inhabited the basement, and emerged from it up into the
light only if they were obliged. Bells obliged them to emerge, and
Wemyss's bath and breakfast, and after his departure to his office the
making of his bed; but then the shades gathered round them again till
next morning, because for a long while now once he had left the house he
hadn't come back till after they were in bed. His re-marriage was going
to disturb them, they were afraid, and the pale wife had forebodings
about meals to be cooked; but at the worst the disturbance would only be
for the three inside days of the week, and anything could be borne when
one had from Friday to Monday to oneself; and as the morning went on,
and no one arrived from Strorley, they began to take heart, and had
almost quite taken it when the telephone bell rang.

It didn't do it very often, for Wemyss had his other addresses, at the
office, at the club, so that Twite, wanting in practice, was not very
good at dealing with it. Also the shrill bell vibrating through the
empty house, so insistent, so living, never failed to agitate both
Twites. It seemed to them uncanny; and Mrs. Twite, watching Twite being
drawn up by it out of his shadows, like some quiet fish sucked
irresistibly up to gasp on the surface, was each time thankful that she
hadn't been born a man.

She always went and listened at the bottom of the kitchen stairs, not
knowing what mightn't happen to Twite up there alone with that voice,
and on this occasion she heard the following:

'No, ma'am, not yet, ma'am.'

'I couldn't say, ma'am.'

'No, no news, ma'am.'

'Oh yes, ma'am, on Friday night.'

'Yes, ma'am, first thing Saturday.'

'Yes, it is, ma'am--very strange, ma'am.'

And then there was silence. He was writing, she knew, on the pad
provided by Wemyss for the purpose.

This was the most trying part of Twite's duties. Any message had to be
written down and left on the hall table, complete with the time of its
delivery, for Wemyss to see when he came in at night. Twite was not a
facile writer. Words confused him. He was never sure how they were
spelt. Also he found it very difficult to remember what had been said,
for there was a hurry and an urgency about a voice on the telephone that
excited him and prevented his giving the message his undivided
attention. Besides, when was a message not a message? Wemyss's orders
were to write down messages. Suppose they weren't messages, must he
still write? Was this, for instance, a message?

He thought he had best be on the safe side, and laboriously wrote it
down.

     Miss Henwissel rang up sir to know if you was come and if so when
     you was coming and what orders we ad and said it was very strange
     12.15.

He had only just put this on the table and was about to descend to his
quiet shades when off the thing started again.

This time it was Wemyss.

'Back to-night late as usual,' he said.

'Yes sir,' said Twite. 'There's just been a----'

But he addressed emptiness.

Meanwhile Miss Entwhistle, after a period of reflection, was ringing up
Strorley 19. The voice of Chesterton, composed and efficient, replied;
and the effect of her replies was to make Miss Entwhistle countermand
lunch and pack a small bag and go to Paddington.

Trains to Strorley at that hour were infrequent and slow, and it wasn't
till nearly five that she drove down the oozy lane in the station cab
and, turning in at the white gate, arrived at The Willows. That sooner
or later she would have to arrive at The Willows now that she was
related to it by marriage was certain, and she had quite made up her
mind, during her four weeks' peace since the wedding, that she was going
to dismiss all foolish prejudices against the place from her mind and
arrive at it, when she did arrive, with a stout heart and an unclouded
countenance. After all, there was much in that _mot_ of her nephew's:
'Somebody has died everywhere.' Yet, as the cab heaved her nearer to the
place along the oozy lane, she did wish that it wasn't in just this
house that Lucy lay in bed. Also she had misgivings at being there
uninvited. In a case of serious illness naturally such misgivings
wouldn't exist; but the maid's voice on the telephone had only said Mrs.
Wemyss had a cold and was staying in bed, and Mr. Wemyss had gone up to
London by the usual train. It couldn't be much that was wrong, or he
wouldn't have gone. Hadn't she, she thought uneasily as she found
herself uninvited within Wemyss's gates, perhaps been a little
impulsive? Yet the idea of that child alone in the sinister house----

She peered out of the cab window. Not at all sinister, she said,
correcting herself severely; all most neat. Perfect order. Shrubs as
they should be. Strong railings. Nice cows.

The cab stopped. Chesterton came down the steps and opened its door.
Nice parlourmaid. Most normal.

'How is Mrs. Wemyss?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

'About the same I believe, ma'am,' said Chesterton; and inquired if she
should pay the man.

Miss Entwhistle paid the man, and then proceeded up the steps followed
by Chesterton carrying her bag. Fine steps. Handsome house.

'Does she know I'm coming?'

'I believe the housemaid did mention it, ma'am.'

Nice roomy hall. With a fire it might be quite warm. Fine windows. Good
staircase.

'Do you wish for tea, ma'am?'

'No thank you. I should like to go up at once, if I may.'

'If you please, ma'am.'

At the turn of the stairs, where the gong was, Miss Entwhistle stood
aside and let Chesterton precede her. 'Perhaps you had better go and
tell Mrs. Wemyss I am here,' she said.

'If you please, ma'am.'

Miss Entwhistle waited, gazing at the gong with the same benevolence she
had brought to bear on everything else. Fine gong. She also gazed at the
antlers on the wall, for the wall continued to bristle with antlers
right up to the top of the house. Magnificent collection.

'If you please, ma'am,' said Chesterton, reappearing, tiptoeing gingerly
to the head of the stairs.

Miss Entwhistle went up. Chesterton ushered her into the bedroom,
closing the door softly behind her.

Miss Entwhistle knew Lucy was small, but not how small till she saw her
in the treble bed. There really did appear to be nothing of her except a
little round head. 'Why, but you've shrunk!' was her first exclamation.

Lucy, who was tucked up to her chin by Lizzie, besides having a wet
bandage encased in flannel round her throat, could only move her eyes
and smile. She was on the side of the bed farthest from the door, and
Miss Entwhistle had to walk round it to reach her. She was still hoarse,
but not as voiceless as when Wemyss left in the morning, for Lizzie had
been diligently plying her with things like hot honey, and her face, as
her eyes followed Miss Entwhistle's approach, was one immense smile. It
really seemed too wonderful to be with Aunt Dot again; and there was a
peace about being ill, a relaxation from strain, that had made her quiet
day, alone in bed, seem sheer bliss. It was so plain that she couldn't
move, that she couldn't do anything, couldn't get up and go in trains,
that her conscience was at rest in regard to Everard; and she lay in the
blessed silence after he left, not minding how much her limbs ached
because of the delicious tranquillity of her mind. The window was open,
and in the garden the birds were busy. The wind had dropped. Except for
the birds there was no sound. Divine quiet. Divine peace. The luxury of
it after the week-end, after the birthday, after the honeymoon, was
extraordinary. Just to be in bed by oneself seemed an amazingly
felicitous condition.

'Lovely of you to come,' she said hoarsely, smiling broadly and looking
so unmistakably contented that Miss Entwhistle, as she bent over her and
kissed her hot forehead, thought, 'It's a success. He's making her
happy.'

'You darling little thing,' she said, smoothing back her hair. 'Fancy
seeing you again like this!'

'Yes,' said Lucy, heavy-eyed and smiling. 'Lovely,' she whispered, 'to
see you. Tea, Aunt Dot?'

It was evidently difficult for her to speak, and her forehead was
extremely hot.

'No, I don't want tea.'

'You'll stay?'

'Yes,' said Miss Entwhistle, sitting down by the pillow and continuing
to smooth back her hair. 'Of course I'll stay. How did you manage to
catch such a cold, I wonder?'

She was left to wonder, undisturbed by any explanations of Lucy's.
Indeed it was as much as Lucy could manage to bring out the most
necessary words. She lay contentedly with her eyes shut, having her hair
stroked back, and said as little as possible.

'Everard--' said Miss Entwhistle, stroking gently, 'is he coming back
to-night?'

'No,' whispered Lucy contentedly.

Aunt Dot stroked in silence.

'Has your temperature been taken?' she asked presently.

'No,' whispered Lucy contentedly.

'Oughtn't you--' after another pause 'to see a doctor?'

'No,' whispered Lucy contentedly. Delicious, simply delicious, to lie
like that having one's hair stroked back by Aunt Dot, the dear, the
kind, the comprehensible.

'So sweet of you to come,' she whispered again.

Well, thought Miss Entwhistle as she sat there softly stroking and
watching Lucy's face of complete content while she dozed off even after
she was asleep the corners of her mouth still were tucked up in a
smile--it was plain that Everard was making the child happy. In that
case he certainly must be all that Lucy had assured her he was, and she,
Miss Entwhistle, would no doubt very quickly now get fond of him. Of
course she would. No doubt whatever. And what a comfort, what a relief,
to find the child happy. Backgrounds didn't matter where there was
happiness. Houses, indeed. What did it matter if they weren't the sort
of houses you would, left to yourself, choose so long as in them dwelt
happiness? What did it matter what their past had been so long as their
present was illuminated by contentment? And as for furniture, why, that
only became of interest, of importance, when life had nothing else in
it. Loveless lives, empty lives, filled themselves in their despair with
beautiful furniture. If you were really happy you had antlers.

In this spirit, while she stroked and Lucy slept, Miss Entwhistle's eye,
full of benevolence, wandered round the room. The objects in it, after
her own small bedroom in Eaton Terrace and its necessarily small
furniture, all seemed to her gigantic. Especially the bed. She had never
seen a bed like it before, though she had heard of such beds in history.
Didn't Og the King of Bashan have one? But what an excellent plan, for
then you could get away from each other. Most sensible. Most wholesome.
And a certain bleakness about the room would soon go when Lucy's little
things got more strewn about,--her books, and photographs, and pretty
dressing-table silver.

Miss Entwhistle's eye arrived at and dwelt on the dressing-table. On it
were two oval wooden-backed brushes without handles. Hairbrushes. Men's.
Also shaving things. And, hanging over one side of the looking-glass,
were three neckties.

She quickly recovered. Most friendly. Most companionable. But a feeling
of not being in Lucy's room at all took possession of her, and she
fidgeted a little. With no business to be there whatever, she was in a
strange man's bedroom. She averted her eyes from Wemyss's toilet
arrangements, they were the last things she wanted to see; and, in
averting them, they fell on the washstand with its two basins and on an
enormous red-brown indiarubber sponge. No such sponge was ever Lucy's.
The conclusion was forced upon her that Lucy and Everard washed side by
side.

From this, too, she presently recovered. After all, marriage was
marriage, and you did things in marriage that you would never dream of
doing single. She averted her eyes from the washstand. The last thing
she wanted to do was to become familiar with Wemyss's sponge.

Her eyes, growing more and more determined in their benevolence, gazed
out of the window. How the days were lengthening. And really a beautiful
look-out, with the late afternoon light reflected on the hills across
the river. Birds, too, twittering in the garden,--everything most
pleasant and complete. And such a nice big window. Lots of air and
light. It reached nearly to the floor. Two housemaids at least, and
strong ones, would be needed to open or shut it,--ah no, there were
cords. A thought struck her: This couldn't be the room, that couldn't be
the window, where----

She averted her eyes from the window, and fixed them on what seemed to
be the only satisfactory resting-place for them, the contented face on
the pillow. Dear little loved face. And the dear, pretty hair,--how
pretty young hair was, so soft and thick. No, of course it wasn't the
window; that tragic room was probably not used at all now. How in the
world had the child got such a cold. She could hear by her breathing
that her chest was stuffed up, but evidently it wasn't worrying her, or
she wouldn't in her sleep look so much pleased. Yes; that room was
either shut up now and never used, or--she couldn't help being struck by
yet another thought--it was a spare room. If so, Miss Entwhistle said to
herself, it would no doubt be her fate to sleep in it. Dear me, she
thought, taken aback.

But from this also she presently recovered; and remembering her
determination to eject all prejudices merely remarked to herself, 'Well,
well.' And, after a pause, was able to add benevolently, 'A house of
varied interest.'



XXVII


Later on in the dining-room, when she was reluctantly eating the meal
prepared for her--Lucy still slept, or she would have asked to be
allowed to have a biscuit by her bedside--Miss Entwhistle said to
Chesterton, who attended her, Would she let her know when Mr. Wemyss
telephoned, as she wished to speak to him.

She was feeling more and more uneasy as time passed as to what Everard
would think of her uninvited presence in his house. It was natural; but
would he think so? What wasn't natural was for her to feel uneasy,
seeing that the house was also Lucy's, and that the child's face had
hardly had room enough on it for the width of her smile of welcome.
There, however, it was,--Miss Entwhistle felt like an interloper. It was
best to face things. She not only felt like an interloper but, in
Everard's eyes, she was an interloper. This was the situation: His wife
had a cold--a bad cold, but not anything serious; nobody had sent for
his wife's aunt; nobody had asked her to come; and here she was. If
that, in Everard's eyes, wasn't being an interloper Miss Entwhistle was
sure he wouldn't know one if he saw one.

In her life she had read many books, and was familiar with those elderly
relatives frequently to be met in them, and usually female, who intrude
into a newly married _ménage_ and make themselves objectionable to one
of the parties by sympathising with the other one. There was no cause
for sympathy here, and if there ever should be Miss Entwhistle would
certainly never sympathise except from a neutral place. She wouldn't
come into a man's house, and in the very act of being nourished by his
food sympathise with his wife; she would sympathise from London. Her
honesty of intention, her single-mindedness, were, she knew, complete.
She didn't feel, she knew she wasn't, in the least like these relatives
in books, and yet as she sat in Everard's chair--obviously it was his;
the upholstered seat was his very shape, inverted--she was afraid,
indeed she was certain, he would think she was one of them.

There she was, she thought, come unasked, sitting in his place, eating
his food. He usedn't to like her; would he like her any the better for
this? From a desire not to have meals of his she had avoided tea, but
she hadn't been able to avoid dinner, and with each dish set before
her--dishes produced surprisingly, as she couldn't but observe, at the
end of an arm thrust to the minute through a door--she felt more and
more acutely that she was in his eyes, if he could only see her, an
interloper. No doubt it was Lucy's house too, but it didn't feel as if
it were, and she would have given much to be able to escape back to
London that night.

But whatever Everard thought of her intrusion she wasn't going to leave
Lucy. Not alone in that house; not to wake up to find herself alone in
that house. Besides, who knew how such a chill would develop? There
ought of course to have been a doctor. When Everard rang up, as he would
be sure to the last thing to ask how Lucy was, she would go to the
telephone, announce her presence, and inquire whether it wouldn't be as
well to have a doctor round in the morning.

Therefore she asked Chesterton to let her know when Mr. Wemyss
telephoned; and Chesterton, surprised, for it was not Wemyss's habit to
telephone to The Willows, all his communications coming on postcards,
paused just an instant before replying, 'If you please, ma'am.'

Chesterton wondered what Wemyss was expected to telephone about. It
wouldn't have occurred to her that it might be about the new Mrs.
Wemyss's health, because he had not within her recollection ever
telephoned about the health of a Mrs. Wemyss. Sometimes the previous
Mrs. Wemyss's health gave way enough for her to stay in bed, but no
telephoning from London had in consequence taken place. Accordingly she
wondered what message could be expected.

'What time would Mr. Wemyss be likely to ring up?' asked Miss Entwhistle
presently, more for the sake of saying something than from a desire to
know. She was going to that telephone, but she didn't want to, she was
in no hurry for it, it wasn't impatience to meet Wemyss's voice making
her talk to Chesterton; what was making her talk was the dining-room.

For not only did its bareness afflict her, and its glaring light, and
its long empty table, and the way Chesterton's footsteps echoed up and
down the uncarpeted floor, but there on the wall was that poor thing
looking at her, she had no doubt whatever as to who it was standing up
in that long slim frock looking at her, and she was taken aback. In
spite of her determination to like all the arrangements, it did seem to
her tactless to have her there, especially as she had that trick of
looking so very steadily at one; and when she turned her eyes away from
the queer, suppressed smile, she didn't like what she saw on the other
wall either,--that enlarged old man, that obvious progenitor.

Having caught sight of both these pictures, which at night were much
more conspicuous than by day, owing to the brilliant unshaded lighting,
Miss Entwhistle had no wish to look at them again, and carefully looked
either at her plate or at Chesterton's back as she hurried down the room
to the dish being held out at the end of the remarkable arm; but being
nevertheless much disturbed by their presence, and by the way she knew
they weren't taking their eyes off her however carefully she took hers
off them, she asked Chesterton what time Wemyss would be likely to
telephone merely in order to hear the sound of a human voice.

Chesterton then informed her that her master never did telephone to The
Willows, so that she was unable to say what time he would.

'But,' said Miss Entwhistle, surprised, 'you have a telephone.'

'If you please, ma'am,' said Chesterton.

Miss Entwhistle didn't like to ask what, then, the telephone was for,
because she didn't wish to embark on anything even remotely approaching
a discussion of Everard's habits, so she wondered in silence.

Chesterton, however, presently elucidated. She coughed a little first,
conscious that to volunteer a remark wasn't quite within her idea of
the perfect parlourmaid, and then she said, 'It's owing to local
convenience, ma'am. We find it indispensable in the isolated situation
of the 'ouse. We gives our orders to the tradesmen by means of the
telephone. Mr. Wemyss installed it for that purpose, he says, and
objects to trunk calls because of the charges and the waste of Mr.
Wemyss's time at the other end, ma'am.'

'Oh,' said Miss Entwhistle.

'If you please, ma'am,' said Chesterton.

Miss Entwhistle said nothing more. With her eyes fixed on her plate in
order to avoid those other eyes, she wondered what she had better do. It
was half-past eight, and Everard hadn't rung up. If he were going to be
anxious enough not to mind the trunk-call charge he would have been
anxious enough before this. That he hadn't rung up showed he regarded
Lucy's indisposition as slight. What, then, would he say to her
uninvited presence there? Nothing, she was afraid, that would be really
hospitable. And she had just eaten a pudding of his. It seemed to curdle
up within her.

'No, _no_ coffee, thank you,' she said hastily, on Chesterton's
inquiring if she wished it served in the library. She had had dinner
because she couldn't help herself, urged to it by the servants, but she
needn't proceed to extras. And the library,--wasn't it in the library
that Everard was sitting the day that poor smiling thing ... yes, she
remembered Lucy telling her so. No, she would not have coffee in the
library.

But now about telephoning. Really the only thing to do, the only way of
dignity, was to ring him up. Useless waiting any more for him to do it;
evidently he wasn't going to. She would ring him up, tell him she was
there, and ask--she clung particularly to the doctor idea, because his
presence would justify hers if the doctor hadn't better look in in the
morning.

Thus it was that, sitting quiet in their basement, the Twites were
startled about nine o'clock that evening by the telephone bell. It
sounded more uncanny than ever up there, making all that noise by itself
in the dark; and when, hurrying up anxiously to it, Twite applied his
ear, all that happened was that an extremely short-tempered voice told
him to hold on.

Twite held on, listening hard and hearing nothing.

'Say 'Ullo, Twite,' presently advised Mrs. Twite from out of the anxious
silence at the foot of the kitchen stairs.

''Ullo,' said Twite half-heartedly.

'Must be a wrong number,' said Mrs. Twite, after more silence. ''Ang it
up, and come and finish your supper.'

A very small voice said something very far away. Twite strained every
nerve to hear. He hadn't yet had to face a trunk call, and he thought
the telephone was fainting.

''Ullo?' he said anxiously, trying to make the word sound polite.

'It's a wrong number,' said Mrs. Twite, after further waiting. ''Ang it
up.'

The voice, incredibly small, began to talk again, and Twite, unable to
hear a word, kept on saying with increasing efforts to sound polite,
''Ullo?'Ullo?'

''Ang it up,' said Mrs. Twite, who from the bottom of the stairs was
always brave.

'That's what it is,' said Twite at last, exhausted. 'It's a wrong
number.' And he went to the writing-pad and wrote:

     A wrong number rang up sir believed to be a lady 9.10.

So Miss Entwhistle at the other end was defeated, and having done her
best and not succeeded she decided to remain quiescent, at any rate
till the morning. Quiescent and uncritical. She wouldn't worry; she
wouldn't criticise; she would merely think of Everard in those terms
of amiability which were natural to her.

But while she was waiting for the call in the cold hall there had been a
moment when her fixed benevolence did a little loosen. Chesterton,
seeing that she shivered, had suggested the library for waiting in,
where she said there was a fire, but Miss Entwhistle preferred to be
cold in the hall than warm in the library; and standing in that bleak
place she saw a line of firelight beneath a door, which she then knew
must be the library. Accordingly she then also knew that Lucy's bedroom
was exactly above the library, for looking up she could see its door
from where she stood; so that it was out of that window.... Her
benevolence for a moment did become unsteady. He let the child sleep
there, he made the child sleep there....

She soon, however, had herself in hand again. Lucy didn't mind, so why
should she? Lucy was asleep there at that moment, with a look of
complete content on her face. But there was one thing Miss Entwhistle
decided she would do: Lucy shouldn't wake up by any chance in the night
and find herself in that room alone,--window or no window, she would
sleep there with her.

This was a really heroic decision, and only love for Lucy made it
possible. Apart from the window and what she believed had happened at
it, apart from the way that poor thing's face in the photograph haunted
her, there was the feeling that it wasn't Lucy's bedroom at all but
Everard's. It was oddly disagreeable to Miss Entwhistle to spend the
night, for instance, with Wemyss's sponge. She debated in the spare-room
when she was getting ready for bed--a small room on the other side of
the house, with a nice high window-sill--whether she wouldn't keep her
clothes on. At least then she would feel more strange, at least she
would feel less at home. But how tiring. At her age, if she sat up all
night--and in her clothes no lying down could be comfortable--she would
be the merest rag next morning, and quite unable to cope on the
telephone with Everard. And she really must take out her hairpins; she
couldn't sleep a wink with them all pressing on her head. Yet the
familiarity of being in that room among the neckties without her
hairpins.... She hesitated, and argued, and all the while she was slowly
taking out her hairpins and taking off her clothes.

At the last moment, when she was in her nightgown and her hair was
neatly plaited and she was looking the goodest of tidy little women, her
courage failed her. No, she couldn't go. She would stay where she was,
and ring and ask that nice housemaid to sleep with Mrs. Wemyss in case
she wanted anything in the night.

She did ring; but by the time Lizzie came Miss Entwhistle, doubting the
sincerity of her motives, had been examining them. Was it really the
neckties? Was it really the sponge? Wasn't it, at bottom, really the
window?

She was ashamed. Where Lucy could sleep she could sleep. 'I rang,' she
said, 'to ask you to be so kind as to help me carry my pillow and
blankets into Mrs. Wemyss's room. I'm going to sleep on the sofa there.'

'Yes ma'am,' said Lizzie, picking them up. 'The sofa's very short and
'aid, ma'am. 'Adn't you better sleep in the bed?'

'No,' said Miss Entwhistle.

'There's plenty of room, ma'am. Mrs. Wemyss wouldn't know you was in it,
it's such a large bed.'

'I will sleep on the sofa,' said Miss Entwhistle.



XXVIII


In London Wemyss went through his usual day, except that he was kept
longer than he liked at his office by the accumulation of business and
by having a prolonged difference of opinion, ending in dismissal, with a
typist who had got out of hand during his absence to the extent of
answering him back. It was five before he was able to leave--and even
then he hadn't half finished, but he declined to be sacrificed
further--and proceed as usual to his club to play bridge. He had a great
desire for bridge after not having played for so long, and it was
difficult, doing exactly the things he had always done, for him to
remember that he was married. In fact he wouldn't have remembered if he
hadn't felt so indignant; but all day underneath everything he did,
everything he said and thought, lay indignation, and so he knew he was
married.

Being extremely methodical he had long ago divided his life inside and
out into compartments, each strictly separate, each, as it were, kept
locked till the proper moment for its turn arrived, when he unlocked it
and took out its contents,--work, bridge, dinner, wife, sleep,
Paddington, The Willows, or whatever it was that it contained. Having
finished with the contents, the compartment was locked up and dismissed
from his thoughts till its turn came round again. A honeymoon was a
great shake-up, but when it occurred he arranged the date of its
cessation as precisely as the date of its inauguration. On such a day,
at such an hour, it would come to an end, the compartments would once
more be unlocked, and regularity resumed. Bridge was the one activity
which, though it was taken out of its compartment at the proper time,
didn't go into it again with any sort of punctuality. Everything else,
including his wife, was locked up to the minute; but bridge would stay
out till any hour. On each of the days in London, the Mondays to
Fridays, he proceeded punctually to his office, and from thence
punctually to his club and bridge. He always lunched and dined at his
club. Other men, he was aware, dined not infrequently at home, but the
explanation of that was that their wives weren't Vera.

The moment, then, that Wemyss found himself once more doing the usual
things among the usual surroundings, he felt so exactly as he used to
that he wouldn't have remembered Lucy at all if it hadn't been for that
layer of indignation at the bottom of his mind. Going up the steps of
his club he was conscious of a sense of hard usage, and searching for
its cause remembered Lucy. His wife now wasn't Vera, and yet he was to
dine at his club exactly as if she were. His wife was Lucy; who, instead
of being where she ought to be, eagerly awaiting his return to Lancaster
Gate--it was one of his legitimate grievances against Vera that she
didn't eagerly await--she was having a cold at Strorley. And why was she
having a cold at Strorley? And why was he, a newly-married man, deprived
of the comfort of his wife and going to spend the evening exactly as he
had spent all the evenings for months past?

Wemyss was very indignant, but he was also very desirous of bridge. If
Lucy had been waiting for him he would have had to leave off bridge
before his desire for it had been anything like sated,--whatever wives
one had they shackled one,--and as it was he could play as long as he
wanted to and yet at the same time remain justly indignant. Accordingly
he wasn't nearly as unhappy as he thought he was; not, at any rate, till
the moment came for going solitary to bed. He detested sleeping by
himself. Even Vera had always slept with him.

Altogether Wemyss felt that he had had a bad day, what with the
disappointment of its beginning, and the extra work at the office, and
no decent lunch 'Positively only time to snatch a bun and a glass of
milk,' he announced, amazed, to the first acquaintance he met in the
club. 'Just fancy, only time to snatch----' but the acquaintance had
melted away and losing rather heavily at bridge, and going back to
Lancaster Gate to find from the message left by Twite that that annoying
aunt of Lucy's had cropped up already.

Usually Wemyss was amused by Twite's messages, but nothing about this
one amused him. He threw down the wrong number one impatiently,--Twite
was really a hopeless imbecile; he would dismiss him; but the other one
he read again. 'Wanted to know all about us, did she. Said it was very
strange, did she. Like her impertinence,' he thought. She had lost no
time in cropping up, he thought. Of how completely Miss Entwhistle had,
in fact, cropped he was of course unaware.

Yes, he had had a bad day, and he was going to have a lonely night. He
went upstairs feeling deeply hurt, and winding his watch.

But after much solid sleep he felt better; and at breakfast he said to
Twite, who always jumped when he addressed him, 'Mrs. Wemyss will be
coming up to-day.'

Twite's brain didn't work very fast owing to the way it spent most of
its time dormant in a basement, and for a moment he thought--it startled
him that his master had forgotten the lady was dead. Ought he to remind
him? What a painful dilemma.... However, he remembered the new Mrs.
Wemyss just in time not to remind him, and to say 'Yes sir,' without too
perceptible a pause. His mind hadn't room in it to contain much, and it
assimilated slowly that which it contained. He had only been in Wemyss's
service three months before the Mrs. Wemyss he found there died. He was
just beginning to assimilate her when she ceased to be assimilatable,
and to him and his wife in their quiet subterraneous existence it had
seemed as if not more than a week had passed before there was another
Mrs. Wemyss. Far was it from him to pass opinions on the rapid marriages
of gentlemen, but he couldn't keep up with these Mrs. Wemysses. His
mind, he found, hadn't yet really realised the new one. He knew she was
there somewhere, for he had seen her briefly on the Saturday morning,
and he knew she would presently begin to disturb him by needing meals,
but he easily forgot her. He forgot her now, and consequently for a
moment had the dreadful thought described above.

'I shall be in to dinner,' said Wemyss.

'Yes sir,' said Twite.

Dinner. There usedn't to be dinner. His master hadn't been in once to
dinner since Twite knew him. A tray for the lady, while there was a
lady; that was all. Mrs. Twite could just manage a tray. Since the lady
had left off coming up to town owing to her accident, there hadn't been
anything. Only quiet.

He stood waiting, not having been waved out of the room, and anxiously
watching Wemyss's face, for he was a nervous man.

Then the telephone bell rang.

Wemyss, without looking up, waved him out to it and went on with his
breakfast; and after a minute, noticing that he neither came back nor
could be heard saying anything beyond a faint, propitiatory ''Ullo,'
called out to him.

'What is it?' Wemyss called out.

'I can't hear, sir,' Twite's distressed voice answered from the hall.

'Fool,' said Wemyss, appearing, table-napkin in hand.

'Yes sir,' said Twite.

He took the receiver from him, and then the Twites--Mrs. Twite from the
foot of the kitchen stairs and Twite lingering in the background because
he hadn't yet been waved away--heard the following:

'Yes yes. Yes, speaking. Hullo. Who is it?'

'What? I can't hear. What?'

'Miss who? En--oh, good-morning, How distant your voice sounds.'

'What? Where? _Where_?'

'Oh really.'

Here the person at the other end talked a great deal.

'Yes. Quite. But then you see she wasn't.'

More prolonged talk from the other end.

'What? She isn't coming up? Indeed she is. She's expected. I've
ordered----'

'What? I can't hear. The doctor? You're sending for the doctor?'

'I daresay. But then you see I consider it isn't.'

'I daresay, I daresay. No, of course I can't. How can I leave my
work----'

'Oh, very well, very well. I daresay. No doubt. She's to come up for all
that as arranged, tell her, and if she needs doctors there are more of
them here anyhow than--what? Can't possibly?'

'I suppose you know you're taking a great deal upon yourself
unasked----'

'What? What?'

A very rapid clear voice cut in. 'Do you want another three minutes?' it
asked.

He hung up the receiver with violence. 'Oh, damn the woman, damn the
woman,' he said, so loud that the Twites shook like reeds to hear him.

At the other end Miss Entwhistle was walking away lost in thought. Her
position was thoroughly unpleasant. She disliked extraordinarily that
she should at that moment contain an egg and some coffee which had once
been Wemyss's. She would have breakfasted on a cup of tea only, if it
hadn't been that Lucy was going to need looking after that day, and the
looker-after must be nourished. As she went upstairs again, a faint red
spot on each cheek, she couldn't help being afraid that she and Everard
would have to exercise patience before they got to be fond of each
other. On the telephone he hardly did himself justice, she thought.

Lucy hadn't had a good night. She woke up suddenly from what was
apparently a frightening dream soon after Miss Entwhistle had composed
herself on the sofa, and had been very restless and hot for a long time.
There seemed to be a great many things about the room that she didn't
like. One of them was the bed. Probably the poor little thing was
bemused by her dream and her feverishness, but she said several things
about the bed which showed that it was on her mind. Miss Entwhistle had
warmed some milk on a spirit-lamp provided by Lizzie, and had given it
to her and soothed her and petted her. She didn't mention the window,
for which Miss Entwhistle was thankful; but when first she woke up from
her frightening dream and her aunt hurried across to her, she had stared
at her and actually called her Everard--her, in her meek plaits. When
this happened Miss Entwhistle made up her mind that the doctor should be
sent for the first thing in the morning. About six she tumbled into an
uncomfortable sleep again, and Miss Entwhistle crept out of the room and
dressed. Certainly she was going to have a doctor round, and hear what
he had to say; and as soon as she was strengthened by breakfast she
would do her duty and telephone to Everard.

This she did, with the result that she returned to Lucy's room with a
little red spot on each cheek; and when she looked at Lucy, still
uneasily sleeping and breathing as though her chest were all sore, the
idea that she was to get up and travel to London made the red spots on
Miss Entwhistle's cheeks burn brighter. She calmed down, however, on
remembering that Everard couldn't see how evidently poorly the child
was, and told herself that if he could he would be all tenderness. She
told herself this, but she didn't believe it; and then she was vexed
that she didn't believe it. Lucy loved him. Lucy had looked perfectly
pleased and content yesterday before she became so ill. One mustn't
judge a man by his way with a telephone.

At ten o'clock the doctor came. He had been in Strorley for years, and
was its only doctor. He was one of those guests who used to dine at The
Willows in the early days of Wemyss's possession of it. Occasionally he
had attended the late Mrs. Wemyss; and the last time he had been in the
house was when he was sent for suddenly on the day of her death. He, in
common with the rest of Strorley, had heard of Wemyss's second marriage,
and he shared the general shocked surprise. Strorley, which looked such
an unconscious place, such a torpid, unconscious riverside place, was
nevertheless intensely sensitive to shocks, and it hadn't at all
recovered from the shock of that poor Mrs. Wemyss's death and the very
dreadful inquest, when the fresh shock of another Mrs. Wemyss arriving
on the scene made it, as it were, reel anew, and made it reel worse.
Marriage so quickly on the heels of that terrible death? The Wemysses
were only week-enders and summer holiday people, so that it wasn't quite
so scandalous to have them in Strorley as it would have been if they
were unintermittent residents, yet it was serious enough. That inquest
had been in all the newspapers. To have a house in one's midst which
produced doubtful coroner's verdicts was a blot on any place, and
the new Mrs. Wemyss couldn't possibly be anything but thoroughly
undesirable. Of course no one would call on her. Impossible. And when
the doctor was rung up and asked to come round, he didn't tell his wife
where he was going, because he didn't wish for trouble.

Chesterton--how well he remembered Chesterton; but after all, it was
only the other day that he was there last--ushered him into the library,
and he was standing gloomily in front of the empty grate, looking
neither to the right nor to the left for he disliked the memories
connected with the flags outside the window, and wishing he had a
partner because then he would have sent him instead, when a spare little
lady, bland and pleasant, came in and said she was the patient's aunt.
An educated little lady; not at all the sort of relative he would have
expected the new Mrs. Wemyss to have.

There was a general conviction in Strorley that the new Mrs. Wemyss must
have been a barmaid, a typist, or a nursery governess,--was, that is,
either very bold, very poor, or very meek. Else how could she have
married Wemyss? And this conviction had reached and infected even the
doctor, who was a busy man off whom gossip usually slid. When, however,
he saw Miss Entwhistle he at once was sure that there was nothing in it.
This wasn't the aunt of either the bold, the poor, or the meek; this was
just a decent gentlewoman. He shook hands with her, really pleased to
see her. Everybody was always pleased to see Miss Entwhistle, except
Wemyss.

'Nothing serious, I hope?' asked the doctor.

Miss Entwhistle said she didn't think there was, but that her nephew----

'You mean Mr. Wemyss?'

She bowed her head. She did mean Mr. Wemyss. Her nephew. Her nephew,
that is, by marriage.

'Quite,' said the doctor.

Her nephew naturally wanted his wife to go up and join him in London.

'Naturally,' said the doctor.

And she wanted to know when she would be fit to go.

'Then let us go upstairs and I'll tell you,' said the doctor.

This was a very pleasant little lady, he thought as he followed her up
the well-known stairs, to have become related to Wemyss immediately on
the top of all that affair. Now he would have said himself that after
such a ghastly thing as that most women----

But here they arrived in the bedroom and his sentence remained
unfinished, because on seeing the small head on the pillow of the treble
bed he thought, 'Why, he's married a child. What an extraordinary
thing.'

'How old is she?' he asked Miss Entwhistle, for Lucy was still uneasily
sleeping; and when she told him he was surprised.

'It's because she's out of proportion to the bed,' explained Miss
Entwhistle in a whisper. 'She doesn't usually look so inconspicuous.'

The whispering and being looked at woke Lucy, and the doctor sat down
beside her and got to business. The result was what Miss Entwhistle
expected: she had a very violent feverish cold, which might turn into
anything if she were not kept in bed. If she were, and with proper
looking after, she would be all right in a few days. He laughed at the
idea of London.

'How did you come to get such a violent chill?' he asked Lucy.

'I don't--know,' she answered.

'Well, don't talk,' he said, laying her hand down on the quilt--he had
been holding it while his sharp eyes watched her--and giving it a brief
pat of farewell. 'Just lie there and get better. I'll send something for
your throat, and I'll look in again to-morrow.'

Miss Entwhistle went downstairs with him feeling as if she had buckled
him on as a shield, and would be able, clad in such armour, to face
anything Everard might say.

'She likes that room?' he asked abruptly, pausing a moment in the hall.

'I can't quite make out,' said Miss Entwhistle. 'We haven't had any talk
at all yet. It was from that window, wasn't it, that----?'

'No. The one above;'

'The one above? Oh really.'

'Yes. There's a sitting-room. But I was thinking whether being in the
same bed--well, good-bye. Cheer her up. She'll want it when she's
better. She'll feel weak. I'll be round to-morrow.'

He went out pulling on his gloves, followed to the steps by Miss
Entwhistle.

On the steps he paused again. 'How does she like being here?' he asked.

'I don't know,' said Miss Entwhistle. 'We haven't talked at all yet.'

She looked at him a moment, and then added, 'She's very much in love.'

'Ah. Yes. Really. I see. Well, good-bye.'

He turned to go.

'It's wonderful, wonderful,' he said, pausing once more.

'What is wonderful?'

'What love will do.'

'It is indeed,' agreed Miss Entwhistle, thinking of all it had done to
Lucy.

He seemed as if he were going to say something more, but thought better
of it and climbed into his dogcart and was driven away.



XXIX


Two days went by undisturbed by the least manifestation from Wemyss.
Miss Entwhistle wrote to him on each of the afternoons, telling him of
Lucy's progress and of what the doctor said about her, and on each of
the evenings she lay down on the sofa to sleep feeling excessively
insecure, for how very likely that he would come down by some late train
and walk in, and then there she would be. In spite of that, she would
have been very glad if he had walked in, it would have seemed more
natural; and she couldn't help wondering whether the little thing in the
bed wasn't thinking so too. But nothing happened. He didn't come, he
didn't write, he made no sign of any sort. 'Curious,' said Miss
Entwhistle to herself; and forbore to criticise further.

They were peaceful days. Lucy was getting better all the time, though
still kept carefully in bed by the doctor, and Miss Entwhistle felt as
much justified in being in the house as Chesterton or Lizzie, for she
was performing duties under a doctor's directions. Also the weather was
quiet and sunshiny. In fact, there was peace.

On Thursday the doctor said Lucy might get up for a few hours and sit on
the sofa; and there, its asperities softened by pillows, she sat and had
tea, and through the open window came the sweet smells of April. The
gardener was mowing the lawn, and one of the smells was of the cut
grass; Miss Entwhistle had been out for a walk, and found some
windflowers and some lovely bright green moss, and put them in a bowl;
the doctor had brought a little bunch of violets out of his garden; the
afternoon sun lay beautifully on the hills across the river; the river
slid past the end of the garden tranquilly; and Miss Entwhistle, pouring
out Lucy's tea and buttering her toast, felt that she could at that
moment very nearly have been happy, in spite of its being The Willows
she was in, if there hadn't, in the background, brooding over her day
and night, been that very odd and disquieting silence of Everard's.

As if Lucy knew what she was thinking, she said--it was the first time
she had talked of him--'You know, Aunt Dot, Everard will have been
fearfully busy this week, because of having been away so long.'

'Oh of course,' agreed Miss Entwhistle with much heartiness. 'I'm sure
the poor dear has been run off his legs.'

'He didn't--he hasn't----'

Lucy flushed and broke off.

'I suppose,' she began again after a minute, 'there's been nothing from
him? No message, I mean? On the telephone or anything?'

'No, I don't think there has--not since our talk the first day,' said
Miss Entwhistle.

'Oh? Did he telephone the first day?' asked Lucy quickly. 'You never
told me.'

'You were asleep nearly all that day. Yes,' said Miss Entwhistle,
clearing her throat, 'we had a--we had quite a little talk.'

'What did he say?'

'Well, he naturally wanted you to be well enough to go up to London, and
of course he was very sorry you couldn't.'

Lucy looked suddenly much happier.

'Yes,' said Miss Entwhistle, as though in answer to the look.

'He hates writing letters, you know, Aunt Dot,' Lucy said presently.

'Men do,' said Miss Entwhistle. 'It's very curious,' she continued
brightly, 'but men _do_.'

'And he hates telephoning. It was wonderful for him to have telephoned
that day.'

'Men,' said Miss Entwhistle, 'are very funny about some things.'

'To-day is Thursday, isn't it,' said Lucy. 'He ought to be here by one
o'clock to-morrow.'

Miss Entwhistle started. 'To-morrow?' she repeated. 'Really? Does he? I
mean, ought he? Somehow I had supposed Saturday. The week-end somehow
suggests Saturdays to me.'

'No. He--we,' Lucy corrected herself, 'come down on Fridays. He's sure
to be down in time for lunch.'

'Oh is he?' said Miss Entwhistle, thinking a great many things very
quickly. 'Well, if it is his habit,' she went on, 'I am sure too that he
will. Do you remember how we set our clocks by him when he came to tea
in Eaton Terrace?'

Lucy smiled, and the remembrance of those days of love, and of all his
dear, funny ways, flooded her heart and washed out for a moment the
honeymoon, the birthday, everything that had happened since.

Miss Entwhistle couldn't but notice the unmistakable love-look. '_Oh_
I'm so glad you love each other so much,' she said with all her heart.
'You know, Lucy, I was afraid that perhaps this house----'

She stopped, because adequately to discuss The Willows in all its
aspects needed, she felt, perfect health on both sides.

'Yes, I don't think a house matters when people love each other,' said
Lucy.

'Not a bit. Not a bit,' agreed Miss Entwhistle. Not even, she thought
robustly, when it was a house with a recent dreadful history. Love--she
hadn't herself experienced it, but what was an imagination for except to
imagine with?--love was so strong an armour that nothing could reach one
and hurt one through it. That was why lovers were so selfish. They sat
together inside their armour perfectly safe, entirely untouchable,
completely uninterested in what happened to the rest of the world.
'Besides,' she went on aloud, 'you'll alter it.'

Lucy's smile at that was a little sickly. Aunt Dot's optimism seemed to
her extravagant. She was unable to see herself altering The Willows.

'You'll have all your father's furniture and books to put about,' said
Aunt Dot, continuing in optimism. 'Why, you'll be able to make the place
really quite--quite----'

She was going to say habitable, but ate another piece of toast instead.

'Yes, I expect I'll have the books here, anyhow,' said Lucy. 'There's a
sitting-room upstairs with room in it.'

'Is there?' said Miss Entwhistle, suddenly very attentive.

'Lots of room. It's to be my sitting-room, and the books could go there.
Except that--except that----'

'Except what?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

'I don't know. I don't much want to alter that room. It was Vera's.'

'I should alter it beyond recognition,' said Miss Entwhistle firmly.

Lucy was silent. She felt too flabby, after her three days with a
temperature, to engage in discussion with anybody firm.

'That's to say,' said Miss Entwhistle, 'if you like having the room at
all. I should have thought----'

'Oh yes, I like having the room,' said Lucy, flushing.

Then it was Miss Entwhistle who was silent; and she was silent because
she didn't believe Lucy really could like having the actual room from
which that unfortunate Vera met her death. It wasn't natural. The child
couldn't mean it. She needed feeding up. Perhaps they had better not
talk about rooms; not till Lucy was stronger. Perhaps they had better
not talk at all, because everything they said was bound in the
circumstances to lead either to Everard or Vera.

'Wouldn't you like me to read aloud to you a little while before you go
back to bed?' she asked, when Lizzie came in to clear away the
tea-things.

Lucy thought this a very good idea. 'Oh do, Aunt Dot,' she said; for she
too was afraid of what talking might lead to. Aunt Dot was phenomenally
quick. Lucy felt she couldn't bear it, she simply couldn't bear it, if
Aunt Dot were to think that perhaps Everard.... So she said quite
eagerly, 'Oh do, Aunt Dot,' and not until she had said it did she
remember that the books were locked up, and the key was on Everard's
watch-chain. Then she sat looking up at Aunt Dot with a startled,
conscience-stricken face.

'What is it, Lucy?' asked Miss Entwhistle, wondering why she had turned
red.

Just in time Lucy remembered that there were Vera's books. 'Do you mind
very much going up to the sitting-room?' she asked. 'Vera's books----'

Miss Entwhistle did mind very much going up to the sitting-room, and saw
no reason why Vera's books should be chosen. Why should she have to read
Vera's books? Why did Lucy want just those, and look so odd and guilty
about it? Certainly the child needed feeding up. It wasn't natural, it
was unwholesome, this queer attraction she appeared to feel towards
Vera.

She didn't say anything of this, but remarked that there was a room
called the library in the house which suggested books, and hadn't she
better choose something from out of that,--go down, instead of go up.

Lucy, painfully flushed, looked at her. Nothing would induce her to tell
her about the key. Aunt Dot would think it so ridiculous.

'Yes, but Everard----' she stammered. 'They're rather special books--he
doesn't like them taken out of the room----'

'Oh,' said Miss Entwhistle, trying hard to avoid any opinion of any
sort.

'But I don't see why you should go up all those stairs, Aunt Dot
darling,' Lucy went on. 'Lizzie will, won't you, Lizzie? Bring down some
of the books--any of them. An armful.'

Lizzie, thus given _carte blanche_, brought down the six first books
from the top shelf, and set them on the table beside Lucy.

Lucy recognised the cover of one of them at once, it was _Wuthering
Heights_.

Miss Entwhistle took it up, read its title in silence, and put it down
again.

The next one was Emily Brontë's collected poems.

Miss Entwhistle took it up, read its title in silence, and put it down
again.

The third one was Thomas Hardy's _Time's Laughing-Stocks_.


Miss Entwhistle took it up, read its title in silence, and put it down
again.

The other three were Baedekers.

'Well, I don't think there's anything I want to read here,' she said.

Lizzie asked if she should take them away then, and bring some more; and
presently she reappeared with another armful.

These were all Baedekers.

'Curious,' said Miss Entwhistle.

Then Lucy remembered that she, too, beneath her distress on Saturday
when she pulled out one after the other of Vera's books in her haste to
understand her, to get comfort, to get, almost she hoped, counsel, had
felt surprise at the number of Baedekers. The greater proportion of the
books in Vera's shelves were guide-books and time-tables. But there had
been other things,--'If you were to bring some out of a different part
of the bookcase,' she suggested to Lizzie; who thereupon removed the
Baedekers, and presently reappeared with more books.

This time they were miscellaneous, and Miss Entwhistle turned them over
with a kind of reverential reluctance. That poor thing; this day last
year she was probably reading them herself. It seemed sacrilege for two
strangers.... Merciful that one couldn't see into the future. What would
the poor creature have thought of the picture presented at that
moment,--the figure in the blue dressing-gown, sitting in the middle of
all the things that had been hers such a very little while before? Well,
perhaps she would have been glad they weren't hers any longer, glad that
she had finished, was done with them. These books suggested such
tiredness, such a--yes, such a wish for escape.... There was more
Hardy,--all the poems this time in one volume. There was Pater--_The
Child in the House_ and _Emerald Uthwart_--Miss Entwhistle, familiar
with these, shook her head: that peculiar dwelling on death in them,
that queer, fascinated inability to get away from it, that beautiful but
sick wistfulness no, she certainly wouldn't read these. There was a book
called _In the Strange South Seas_; and another about some island in the
Pacific; and another about life in the desert; and one or two others,
more of the flamboyant guide-book order, describing remote, glowing
places....

Suddenly Miss Entwhistle felt uncomfortable. She put down the book she
was holding, and folded her hands in her lap and gazed out of the window
at the hills on the other side of the river. She felt as if she had been
prying, and prying unpardonably. The books people read,--was there ever
anything more revealing? No, she refused to examine Vera's books
further. And apart from that horrible feeling of prying upon somebody
defenceless, upon somebody pitiful, she didn't wish to allow the thought
these books suggested to get any sort of hold on her mind. It was
essential, absolutely essential, that it shouldn't. And if Lucy ever----

She got up and went to the window. Lucy's eyes followed her, puzzled.
The gardener was still mowing the lawn, working very hard at it as
though he were working against time. She watched his back, bent with
hurry as he and the boy laboriously pushed and pulled the machine up and
down; and then she caught sight of the terrace just below, and the
flags.

This was a dreadful house. Whichever way one looked one was entangled in
a reminder. She turned away quickly, and there was that little loved
thing in her blue wrapper, propped up on Vera's pillows, watching her
with puzzled anxiety. Nothing could harm that child, she was safe, so
long as she loved and believed in Everard; but suppose some day--suppose
gradually--suppose a doubt should creep into her mind whether perhaps,
after all, Vera's fall ... suppose a question should get into her head
whether perhaps, after all, Vera's death----?

Aunt Dot knew Lucy's face so well that it seemed absurd to examine it
now, searching for signs in its features and expression of enough
character, enough nerves, enough--this, if there were enough of it,
might by itself carry her through--sense of humour. Yes, she had a
beautiful sweep of forehead; all that part of her face was lovely--so
calm and open, with intelligent, sweet eyes. But were those dear eyes
intelligent enough? Was not sweetness really far more manifest in them
than intelligence? After that her face went small, and then, looking
bigger than it was because of her little face, was her kind, funny
mouth. Generous; easily forgiving; quick to be happy; quick to
despair,--Aunt Dot, looking anxiously at it, thought she saw all this in
the shape of Lucy's mouth. But had the child strength? Had she the
strength that would be needed equally--supposing that doubt and that
question should ever get into her head--for staying or for going; for
staying or for running ... oh, but running, running, for her very
_life_....

With a violent effort Miss Entwhistle shook herself free from these
thoughts. Where in heaven's name was her mind wandering to? It was
intolerable, this tyranny of suggestion in everything one looked at
here, in everything one touched. And Lucy, who was watching her and who
couldn't imagine why Aunt Dot should be so steadfastly gazing at her
mouth, naturally asked, 'Is anything the matter with my face?'

Then Miss Entwhistle managed to smile, and came and sat down again
beside the sofa. 'No,' she said, taking her hand. 'But I don't think I
want to read after all. Let us talk.'

And holding Lucy's hand, who looked a little afraid at first but soon
grew content on finding what the talk was to be about, she proceeded to
discuss supper, and whether a poached egg or a cup of beef-tea contained
the greater amount of nourishment.



XXX


Also she presently told her, approaching it with caution, for she was
sure Lucy wouldn't like it, that as Everard was coming down next day she
thought it better to go back to Eaton Terrace in the morning.

'You two love-birds won't want me,' she said gaily, expecting and
prepared for opposition; but really, as the child was getting well so
quickly, there was no reason why she and Everard should be forced to
begin practising affection for each other here and now. Besides, in the
small bag she brought there had only been a nightgown and her washing
things, and she couldn't go on much longer on only that.

To her surprise Lucy not only agreed but looked relieved. Miss
Entwhistle was greatly surprised, and also greatly pleased. 'She adores
him,' she thought, 'and only wants to be alone with him. If Everard
makes her as happy as all that, who cares what he is like to me or to
anybody else in the world?'

And all the horrible, ridiculous things she had been thinking half an
hour before were blown away like so many cobwebs.

Just before half-past seven, while she was in her room on the other side
of the house tidying herself before facing Chesterton and the evening
meal she had reduced it to the merest skeleton of a meal, but Chesterton
insisted on waiting, and all the usual ceremonies were observed--she was
startled by the sound of wheels on the gravel beneath the window. It
could only be Everard. He had come.

'Dear me,' said Miss Entwhistle to herself,--and she who had planned to
be gone so neatly before his arrival!

It would be idle to pretend that she wasn't very much perturbed,--she
was; and the brush with which she was tidying her pretty grey hair shook
in her hand. Dinner alone with Everard,--well, at least let her be
thankful that he hadn't arrived a few minutes later and found her
actually sitting in his chair. What would have happened if he had? Miss
Entwhistle, for all her dismay, couldn't help laughing. Also, she
encouraged herself for the encounter by remembering the doctor. Behind
his authority she was secure. She had developed, since Tuesday, from an
uninvited visitor into an indispensable adjunct. Not a nurse; Lucy
hadn't at any moment been positively ill enough for a nurse; but an
adjunct.

She listened, her brush suspended. There was no mistaking it: it was
certainly Everard, for she heard his voice. The wheels of the cab, after
the interval necessary for ejecting him, turned round again on the
drive, crunching much less, and went away, and presently there was his
well-known deliberate, heavy tread coming up the uncarpeted staircase.
Thank God for bedrooms, thought Miss Entwhistle, fervently brushing.
Where would one be without them and bathrooms,--places of legitimate
lockings-in, places even the most indignant host was bound to respect?

Now this wasn't the proper spirit in which to go down and begin getting
fond of Everard and giving him the opportunity of getting fond of her,
as she herself presently saw. Besides, at that very moment Lucy was
probably in his arms, all alight with joyful surprise, and if he could
make Lucy so happy there must be enough of good in him to enable him
to fulfil the very mild requirements of Lucy's aunt. Just bare
pleasantness, bare decency would be enough. She stoutly assured herself
of her certainty of being fond of Everard if only he would let her.
Sufficiently fond of him, that is; she didn't suppose any affection she
was going to feel for him would ever be likely to get the better of her
reason.

Immediately on Wemyss's arrival the silent house had burst into feverish
life. Doors banged, feet ran; and now Lizzie came hurrying along the
passage, and knocked at the door and told her breathlessly that dinner
would be later not for at least another half hour, because Mr. Wemyss
had come unexpectedly, and cook had to----

She didn't finish the sentence, she was in such a hurry to be off.

Miss Entwhistle, her simple preparations being complete, had nothing
left to do but sit in one of those wicker work chairs with thin, hard,
cretonne-covered upholstery, which are sometimes found in inhospitable
spare-rooms and wait.

She found this bad for her _morale_. There wasn't a book in the room, or
she would have distracted her thoughts by reading. She didn't want
dinner. She would have best liked to get into the bed she hadn't yet
slept once in, and stay there till it was time to go home, but her pride
blushed scarlet at such a cowardly desire. She arranged herself,
therefore, in the chair, and, since she couldn't read, tried to remember
something to say over to herself instead, some poem, or verse of a poem,
to take her attention off the coming dinner; and she was shocked to
find, as she sat there with her eyes shut to keep out the light that
glared on her from the middle of the ceiling, that she could remember
nothing but fragments: loose bits floating derelict round her mind,
broken spars that didn't even belong, she was afraid, to any really
magnificent whole. How Jim would have scolded her,--Jim who forgot
nothing that was beautiful.

     By nature cool, in pious habits bred,
     She looked on husbands with a virgin's dread....

Now where did that come from? And why should it come at all?

     Such was the tone and manners of them all
     No married lady at the house would call....

And that, for instance? She couldn't remember ever having read any poem
that could contain these lines, yet she must have; she certainly hadn't
invented them.

And this,--an absurd German thing Jim used to quote and laugh at:

     Der Sultan winkt, Zuleika schweigt,
     Und zeigt sich gänzlich abgeneigt....

Why should a thing like that rise now to the surface of her mind and
float round on it, while all the noble verse she had read and enjoyed,
which would have been of such use and support to her at this juncture,
was nowhere to be found, not a shred of it, in any corner of her brain?

What a brain, thought Miss Entwhistle, disgusted, sitting up very
straight in the wickerwork chair, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes
shut; what a contemptible, anæmic brain, deserting her like this, only
able to throw up to the surface when stirred, out of all the store of
splendid stuff put so assiduously into it during years and years of
life, couplets.

A sound she hadn't yet heard began to crawl round the house, and, even
while she wondered what it was, increased and increased till it seemed
to her at last as if it must fill the universe and reach to Eaton
Terrace.

It was that gong. Become active. Heavens, and what activity. She
listened amazed. The time it went on! It went on and on, beating in her
ears like the crack of doom.

When the three great final strokes were succeeded by silence, she got up
from her chair. The moment had come. A last couplet floated through her
brain,--her brain seemed to clutch at it:

     Betwixt the stirrup and the ground
     She mercy sought, she mercy found....

Now where did that come from? she asked herself distractedly, nervously
passing one hand over her already perfectly tidy hair and opening the
door with the other.

There was Wemyss, opening Lucy's door at the same moment.

'Oh how do you do, Everard,' said Miss Entwhistle, advancing with all
the precipitate and affectionate politeness of one who is greeting not
only a host but a nephew.

'Quite well thank you,' was Everard's slightly unexpected reply; but
logical, perfectly logical.

She held out her hand and he shook it, and then proceeded past her to
her bedroom door, which she had left open, and switched off the light,
which she had left on.

'Oh I'm sorry,' said Miss Entwhistle.

'That,' she thought, 'is one to Everard.'

She waited for his return, and then walked, followed by him in silence,
down the stairs.

'How do you find Lucy?' she asked when they had got to the bottom. She
didn't like Everard's silences; she remembered several of them during
that difference of opinion he and she had had about where Christmas
should be spent. They weighed on her; and she had the sensation of
wriggling beneath them like an earwig beneath a stone, and it humiliated
her to wriggle.

'Just as I expected,' he said. 'Perfectly well.'

'Oh no--not perfectly well,' exclaimed Miss Entwhistle, a vision of the
blue-wrapped little figure sitting weakly up against the pillows that
afternoon before her eyes. 'She is better to-day, but not nearly well.'

'You asked me what I thought, and I've told you,' said Wemyss.

No, it wouldn't be an impulsive affection, hers and Everard's, she
felt; it would, when it did come, be the result of slow and careful
preparation,--line upon line, here a little and there a little.

'Won't you go in?' he asked; and she perceived he had pushed the
dining-room door open and was holding it back with his arm while she,
thinking this, lingered.

'That,' she thought, 'is another to Everard,'--her second bungle; first
the light left on in her room, now keeping him waiting.

She hurried through the door, and then, vexed with herself for hurrying,
walked to her chair with almost an excess of deliberation.

'The doctor----' she began, when they were in their places, and
Chesterton was hovering in readiness to snatch the cover off the soup
the instant Wemyss had finished arranging his table-napkin.

'I wish to hear nothing about the doctor,' he interrupted.

Miss Entwhistle gave herself pains to be undaunted, and said with almost
an excess of naturalness, 'But I'd like to tell you.'

'It is no concern of mine,' he said.

'But you're her husband, you know,' said Miss Entwhistle, trying to
sound pleasant.

'I gave no orders,' said Wemyss.

'But he had to be sent for. The child----'

'So you say. So you said on the telephone. And I told you then you were
taking a great deal on yourself, unasked.'

Miss Entwhistle hadn't supposed that any one ever talked like this
before servants. She now knew that she had been mistaken.

'He's your doctor,' said Wemyss.

'My doctor?'

'I regard him entirely as your doctor.'

'I wish, Everard,' said Miss Entwhistle politely, after a pause, 'that I
understood.'

'You sent for him on your own responsibility, unasked. You must take the
consequences.'

'I don't know what you mean by the consequences,' said Miss Entwhistle,
who was getting further and further away from that beginning of
affection for Everard to which she had braced herself.

'The bill,' said Wemyss.

'Oh,' said Miss Entwhistle.

She was so much surprised that she could only ejaculate just that. Then
the idea that she was in the act of being nourished by Wemyss's soup
seemed to her so disagreeable that she put down her spoon.

'Certainly if you wish it,' she said.

'I do,' said Wemyss.

The conversation flagged.

Presently, sitting up very straight, refusing to take any notice of the
variety and speed of the thoughts rushing round inside her and
determined to behave as if she weren't minding anything, she said in a
very clear little voice which she strove to make sound pleasant, 'Did
you have a good journey down?'

'No,' said Wemyss, waving the soup away.

This as an answer, though no doubt strictly truthful, was too bald for
much to be done with it. Miss Entwhistle therefore merely echoed, as she
herself felt foolishly, 'No?'

And Wemyss confirmed his first reply by once more saying, 'No.'

The conversation flagged.

'I suppose,' she then said, making another effort, 'the train was very
full.'

As this was not a question he was silent, and allowed her to suppose.

The conversation flagged.

'Why is there no fish?' he asked Chesterton, who was offering him
cutlets.

'There was no time to get any, sir,' said Chesterton.

'He might have known that,' thought Miss Entwhistle.

'You will tell the cook that I consider I have not dined unless there is
fish.'

'Yes sir,' said Chesterton.

'Goose,' thought Miss Entwhistle.

It was easier, and far less nerve-racking, to regard him indulgently as
a goose than to let oneself get angry. He was like a great cross
schoolboy, she thought, sitting there being rude; but unfortunately a
schoolboy with power.

He ate the cutlets in silence. Miss Entwhistle declined them. She had
missed her chance, she thought, when the cab was beneath her window and
all she had to do was to lean out and say, 'Wait a minute.' But then
Lucy,--ah yes, Lucy. The minute she thought of Lucy she felt she
absolutely must be friends with Everard. Incredible as it seemed to her,
and always had seemed from the first, that Lucy should love him, there
it was,--she did. It couldn't be possible to love him without any
reason. Of course not. The child knew. The child was wise and tender.
Therefore Miss Entwhistle made another attempt at resuscitating
conversation.

Watching her opportunity when Chesterton's back was receding down the
room towards the outstretched arm at the end, for she didn't mind what
Wemyss said quite so acutely if Chesterton wasn't looking, she said with
as natural a voice as she could manage, 'I'm very glad you've come, you
know. I'm sure Lucy has been missing you very much.'

'Lucy can speak for herself,' he said.

Then Miss Entwhistle concluded that conversation with Everard was too
difficult. Let it flag. She couldn't, whatever he might feel able to do,
say anything that wasn't polite in the presence of Chesterton. She
doubted whether, even if Chesterton were not there, she would be able
to; and yet continued politeness appeared in the face of his answers
impossible. She had best be silent, she decided; though to withdraw into
silence was of itself a humiliating defeat.

When she was little Miss Entwhistle used to be rude. Between the ages of
five and ten she frequently made faces at people. But not since then.
Ten was the latest. After that good manners descended upon her, and had
enveloped her ever since. Nor had any occasion arisen later in her life
in which she had even been tempted to slough them. Urbane herself, she
dwelt among urbanities; kindly, she everywhere met kindliness. But she
did feel now that it might, if only she could so far forget herself,
afford her solace were she able to say, straight at him, 'Wemyss.'

Just that word. No more. For some reason she was dying to call him
Wemyss without any Mr. She was sure that if she might only say that one
word, straight at him, she would feel better; as much relieved as she
did when she was little and made faces.

Dreadful; dreadful. She cast down her eyes, overwhelmed by the nature of
her thoughts, and said No thank you to the pudding.

'It is clear,' thought Wemyss, observing her silence and her refusal to
eat, 'where Lucy gets her sulking from.'

No more words were spoken till, dinner being over, he gave the order for
coffee in the library.

'I'll go and say good-night to Lucy,' said Miss Entwhistle as they got
up.

'You'll be so good as to do nothing of the sort,' said Wemyss.

'I--beg your pardon?' inquired Miss Entwhistle, not quite sure she could
have heard right.

At this point they were both just in front of Vera's portrait on their
way to the door, and she was looking at each of them, impartially
strangling her smile.

'I wish to speak to you in the library,' said Wemyss.

'But suppose I don't wish to be spoken to in the library?' leapt to the
tip of Miss Entwhistle's tongue.

There, however, was Chesterton,--checking, calming.

So she said, instead, 'Do.'



XXXI


She hadn't been into the library yet. She knew the dining-room, the
hall, the staircase, Lucy's bedroom, the spare-room, the antlers, and
the gong; but she didn't know the library. She had hoped to go away
without knowing it. However, she was not to be permitted to.

The newly-lit wood fire blazed cheerfully when they went in, but its
amiable light was immediately quenched by the electric light Wemyss
switched on at the door. From the middle of the ceiling it poured down
so strongly that Miss Entwhistle wished she had brought her sun-shade.
The blinds were drawn, and there in front of the window was the table
where Everard had sat writing--she remembered every word of Lucy's
account of it on that July afternoon of Vera's death. It was now April;
still well over three months to the first anniversary of that dreadful
day, and here he was married again, and to, of all people in the world,
her Lucy. There were so many strong, robust-minded young women in the
world, so many hardened widows, so many thick-skinned persons of mature
years wanting a comfortable home, who wouldn't mind Everard because they
wouldn't love him and therefore wouldn't feel,--why should Fate have
ordered that it should just be her Lucy? No, she didn't like him, she
couldn't like him. He might, and she hoped he was, be all Lucy said, be
wonderful and wholesome and natural and all the rest of it, but if he
didn't seem so to her what, as far as she was concerned, was the good of
it?

The fact is that by the time Miss Entwhistle got into the library she
was very angry. Even the politest worm, she said to herself, the most
conciliatory, sensible worm, fully conscious that wisdom points to
patience, will nevertheless turn on its niece's husband if trodden on
too heavily. The way Wemyss had ordered her not to go up to Lucy....
Particularly enraging to Miss Entwhistle was the knowledge of her weak
position, uninvited in his house.

Wemyss, standing on the hearthrug in front of the blaze, filled his
pipe. How well she knew that attitude and that action. How often she had
seen both in her drawing-room in London. And hadn't she been kind to
him? Hadn't she always, when she was hostess and he was guest, been
hospitable and courteous? No, she didn't like him.

She sat down in one of the immense chairs, and had the disagreeable
sensation that she was sitting down in Wemyss hollowed out. The two
little red spots were brightly on her cheek-bones,--had been there,
indeed, ever since the beginning of dinner.

Wemyss filled his pipe with his customary deliberation, saying nothing.
'I believe he's enjoying himself,' flashed into her mind. 'Enjoying
being in a temper, and having me to bully.'

'Well?' she asked, suddenly unbearably irritated.

'Oh it's no good taking that tone with me,' he said, continuing
carefully to fill his pipe.

'Really, Everard,' she said, ashamed of him, but also ashamed of
herself. She oughtn't to have let go her grip on herself and said,
'Well?' with such obvious irritation.

The coffee came.

'No thank you,' said Miss Entwhistle.

He helped himself.

The coffee went.

'Perhaps,' said Miss Entwhistle in a very polite voice when the door had
been shut by Chesterton, 'you'll tell me what it is you wish to say.'

'Certainly. One thing is that I've ordered the cab to come round for you
to-morrow in time for the early train.'

'Oh thank you, Everard. That is most thoughtful,' said Miss Entwhistle.
'I had already told Lucy, when she said you would be down to-morrow,
that I would go home early.'

'That's one thing,' said Wemyss, taking no notice of this and going on
carefully filling his pipe. 'The other is, that I don't wish you to see
Lucy again, either to-night or before you go.'

She looked at him in astonishment. 'But why not?' she asked.

'I'm not going to have her upset.'

'But my dear Everard, don't you see it will upset her much more if I
don't say good-bye to her? It won't upset her at all if I do, because
she knows I'm going to-morrow anyhow. Why, what will the child think?'

'Oblige me by allowing me to be the best judge of my own affairs.'

'Do you know I very much doubt if you're that,' said Miss Entwhistle
earnestly, really moved by his inability to perceive consequences. Here
he had got everything, everything to make him happy for the rest of his
life,--the wife he loved adoring him, believing in him, blotting out by
her mere marrying him every doubt as to the exact manner of Vera's
death, and all he had to do was to be kind and ordinarily decent. And
poor Everard--it was absurd of her to mind for him, but she did in fact
at that moment mind for him, he seemed such a pathetic human being,
blindly bent on ruining his own happiness--would spoil it all,
inevitably smash it all sooner or later, if he wasn't able to see,
wasn't able to understand....

Wemyss considered her remark so impertinent that he felt he would have
been amply justified in requesting her to leave his house then and
there, dark or no dark, train or no train. And so he would have done, if
he hadn't happened to prefer a long rather than a short scene.

'I didn't ask you into my library to hear your opinion of my character,'
he said, lighting his pipe.

'Well then,' said Miss Entwhistle, for there was too much at stake for
her to allow herself either to be silenced or goaded, 'let me tell you a
few things about Lucy's.'

'About Lucy's?' echoed Wemyss, amazed at such effrontery. 'About my
wife's?'

'Yes,' said Miss Entwhistle, very earnestly. 'It's the sort of character
that takes things to heart, and she'll be miserable--miserable, Everard,
and worry and worry if I just disappear as you wish me to without a
word. Of course I'll go, and I promise I'll never come again unless you
ask me to. But don't, because you're angry, insist on something that
will make Lucy extraordinarily unhappy. Let me say good-night to her
now, and good-bye to-morrow morning. I tell you she'll be terribly
worried if I don't. She'll think'--Miss Entwhistle tried to smile--'that
you've turned me out. And then, you see, if she thinks that, she won't
be able----' Miss Entwhistle hesitated. 'Well, she won't be able to be
proud of you. And that, my dear Everard--' she looked at him with a
faint smile of deprecation and apology that she, a spinster, should talk
of this--'gives love its deepest wound.'

Wemyss stared at her, too much amazed to speak. In his house.... In his
own house!

'I'm sorry,' she said, still more earnestly, 'if this annoys you, but I
do want--I really do think it is very important.'

There was then a silence during which they looked at each other, he at
her in amazement, she at him trying to hope,--hope that he would take
what she had said in good part. It was so vital that he should
understand, that he should get an idea of the effect on Lucy of just
that sort of unkind, even cruel behaviour. His own happiness was
involved as well. Tragic, tragic for every one if he couldn't be got to
see....

'Are you aware,' he said, 'that this is my house?'

'Oh Everard----' she said at that, with a movement of despair.

'Are you aware,' he continued, 'that you are talking to a husband of his
wife?'

Miss Entwhistle said nothing, but leaning her head on her hand looked at
the fire.

'Are you aware that you thrust yourself into my house uninvited directly
my back was turned, and have been living in it, and would have gone on
indefinitely living in it, without any sanction from me unless I had
come down, as I did come down, on purpose to put an end to such an
outrageous state of affairs?'

'Of course,' she said, 'that is one way of describing it.'

'It is the way of every reasonable and decent person,' said Wemyss.

'Oh no,' said Miss Entwhistle. 'That is precisely what it isn't. But,'
she added, getting up from the chair and holding out her hand, 'it is
your way, and so I think, Everard, I'll say good-night. And good-bye
too, for I don't expect I'll see you in the morning.'

'One would suppose,' he said, taking no notice of her proffered hand,
for he hadn't nearly done, 'from your tone that this was your house and
I was your servant.'

'I assure you I could never imagine it to be my house or you my
servant.'

'You made a great mistake, I can tell you, when you started interfering
between husband and wife. You have only yourself to thank if I don't
allow you to continue to see Lucy.'

She stared at him.

'Do you mean,' she said, after a silence, 'that you intend to prevent my
seeing her later on too? In London?'

'That, exactly, is my intention.'

Miss Entwhistle stared at him, lost in thought; but he could see he had
got her this time, for her face had gone visibly pale.

'In that case, Everard,' she said presently, 'I think it my duty----'

'Don't begin about duties. You have no duties in regard to me and my
household.'

'I think it my duty to tell you that from my knowledge of Lucy----'

'Your knowledge of Lucy! What is it compared to mine, I should like to
know?'

'Please listen to me. It's most important. From my knowledge of her, I'm
quite sure she hasn't the staying power of Vera.'

It was now his turn to stare. She was facing him, very pale, with
shining, intrepid eyes. He had got her in her vulnerable spot he could
see, or she wouldn't be so white, but she was going to do her utmost to
annoy him up to the last.

'The staying power of----?' he repeated.

'I'm sure of it. And you must be wise, you must positively have the
wisdom to take care of your own happiness----'

'Oh good God, you preaching woman!' he burst out. 'How dare you stand
there in my own house talking to me of Vera?'

'Hush,' said Miss Entwhistle, her eyes shining brighter and brighter in
her white face. 'Listen to me. It's atrocious that I should have to, but
nobody ever seems to have told you a single thing in your life. You
don't seem to know anything at all about women, anything at all about
human beings. How could you bring a girl like Lucy--any young wife--to
this house? But here she is, and it still may be all right because she
loves you so, if you take care, if you are tender and kind. I assure you
it is nothing to me how angry you are with me, or how completely you
separate me from Lucy, if only you are kind to her. Don't you realise,
Everard, that she may soon begin to have a baby, and that then she----'

'You indelicate woman! You incredibly indecent, improper----'

'I don't in the least mind what you say to me, but I tell you that
unless you take care, unless you're kinder than you're being at this
moment, it won't be anything like fifteen years this time.'

He repeated, staring, 'Fifteen years this time?'

'Yes. Good-bye.'

And she was gone, and had shut the door behind her before her monstrous
meaning dawned on him.

Then, when it did, he strode out of the room after her.

She was going up the stairs very slowly.

'Come down,' he said.

She went on as if she hadn't heard him.

'Come down. If you don't come down at once I'll fetch you.'

This, through all her wretchedness, through all her horror, for beating
in her ears were two words over and over again, _Lucy, Vera_--_Lucy,
Vera_ struck her as so absurd, the vision of herself, more naturally
nimble, going on up the stairs just out of Wemyss's reach, with him
heavily pursuing her, till among the attics at the top he couldn't but
run her to earth in a cistern, that she had great difficulty in not
spilling over into a ridiculous, hysterical laugh.

'Very well then,' she said, stopping and speaking in a low voice so that
Lucy shouldn't be disturbed by unusual sounds, 'I'll come down.' And
shining, quivering with indomitableness, she did.

She arrived at the bottom of the stairs where he was standing and faced
him. What was he going to do? Take her by the shoulders and turn her
out? Not a sign, not the smallest sign of distress or fear should he get
out of her. Fear of him in relation to herself was the last thing she
would condescend to feel, but fear for Lucy--for Lucy.... She could very
easily have cried out because of Lucy, entreated to be allowed to see
her sometimes, humbled herself, if she hadn't gripped hold of the
conviction of his delight if she broke down, of his delight at having
broken her down, at refusing. The thought froze her serene.

'You will now leave my house,' said Wemyss through his teeth.

'Without my hat, Everard?' she inquired mildly.

He didn't answer. He would gladly at that moment have killed her, for he
thought he saw she was laughing at him. Not openly. Her face was serious
and her voice polite; but he thought he saw she was laughing at him, and
beyond anything that could happen to him he hated being defied.

He walked to the front door, reached up and undid the top bolt, stooped
down and undid the bottom bolt, turned the key, took the chain off,
pulled the door open, and said, 'There now. Go. And let this be a lesson
to you.'

'I am glad to see,' said Miss Entwhistle, going out on to the steps with
dignity, and surveying the stars with detachment, 'that it is a fine
night.'

He shut and bolted and locked and chained her out, and as soon as he had
done, and she heard his footsteps going away, and her eyes were a little
accustomed to the darkness, she went round to the back entrance, rang
the bell, and asked the astonished tweeny, who presently appeared, to
send Lizzie to her; and when Lizzie came, also astonished, she asked her
to be so kind as to go up to her room and put her things in her bag and
bring her her hat and cloak and purse.

'I'll wait here in the garden,' said Miss Entwhistle, 'and it would be
most kind, Lizzie, if you were rather quick.'

Then, when she had got her belongings, and Lizzie had put her cloak
round her shoulders and tried to express, by smoothings and brushings of
it, her understanding and sympathy, for it was clear to Lizzie and to
all the servants that Miss Entwhistle was being turned out, she went
away; she went away past the silent house, through the white gate, up
through the darkness of the sunken oozy lane, out on to the road where
the stars gave light, across the bridge, into the village, along the
road to the station, to wait for whatever train should come.

She walked slower and slower.

She was extraordinarily tired.



XXXII


Wemyss went back into the library, and seeing his coffee still on the
chimney-piece he drank it, and then sat down in the chair Miss
Entwhistle had just left, and smoked.

He wouldn't go up to Lucy yet; not till he was sure the woman wasn't
going to try any tricks of knocking at the front door or ringing bells.
He actually, so inaccurate was his perception of Miss Entwhistle's
character and methods, he actually thought she might perhaps throw
stones at the windows, and he decided to remain downstairs guarding his
premises till this possibility became, with the lapse of time, more
remote.

Meanwhile the fury of his indignation at the things she had said was
immensely tempered by the real satisfaction he felt in having turned her
out. That was the way to show people who was master, and meant to be
master, in his own house. She had supposed she could do as she liked
with him, use his house, be waited on by his servants, waste his
electric light, interfere between him and his wife, say what she chose,
lecture him, stand there and insult him, and he had showed her very
quickly and clearly that she couldn't. As to her final monstrous
suggestion, it merely proved how completely he had got her, how
accurately he had hit on the punishment she felt most, that she should
have indulged in such ravings. The ravings of impotence, that's what
that was. For the rest of his life, he supposed, whenever people
couldn't get their own way with him, were baffled by his steadfastness
and consequently became vindictive, they would throw that old story up
against him. Let them. It wouldn't make him budge, not a hair's-breadth,
in any direction he didn't choose. Master in his own house,--that's what
he was.

Curious how women invariably started by thinking they could do as they
liked with him. Vera had thought so, and behaved accordingly; and she
had been quite surprised, and even injured, when she discovered she
couldn't. No doubt this woman was feeling considerably surprised too
now; no doubt she never dreamt he would turn her out. Women never
believed he would do the simple, obvious thing. And even when he warned
them that he would, as he could remember on several occasions having
warned Vera--indeed, it was recorded in his diary--they still didn't
believe it. Daunted themselves by convention and the fear of what people
might think, they imagined that he would be daunted too. Then, when he
wasn't, and it happened, they were surprised; and they never seemed to
see that they had only themselves to thank.

He sat smoking and thinking a long time, one ear attentive to any sounds
which might indicate that Miss Entwhistle was approaching hostilely from
outside. Chesterton found him sitting like that when she came in to
remove the coffee cup, and she found him still sitting like that when
she came in an hour later with his whisky.

It was nearly eleven before he decided that the danger of attack was
probably over; but still, before he went upstairs, he thought it prudent
to open the window and step over the sill on to the terrace and just
look round.

All was as quiet as the grave. It was so quiet that he could hear a
little ripple where the water was split by a dead branch as the river
slid gently along. There were stars, so that it was not quite dark; and
although the April air was moist it was dry under foot. A pleasant night
for a walk. Well, he would not grudge her that.

He went along the terrace, and round the clump of laurustinus bushes
which cloaked the servants' entrance, to the front of the house.

Empty. Nobody still lingering on the steps.

He then proceeded as far as the white gate, holding her capable of
having left it open on purpose,--'In order to aggravate me,' as he put
it to himself.

It was shut.

He stood leaning on it a minute listening, in case she should be lurking
in the lane.

Not a sound.

Satisfied that she had really gone, he returned to the terrace and
re-entered the library, fastening the window carefully and pulling down
the blind.

What a relief, what an extraordinary relief, to have got rid of her; and
not just for this once, but for good. Also she was Lucy's only relation,
so there were no more of them to come and try to interfere between man
and wife. He was very glad she had behaved so outrageously at the end
saying that about Vera, for it justified him completely in what he had
done. A little less bad behaviour, and she would have had to be allowed
to stay the night; still a little less, and she would have had to come
to The Willows again, let alone having a free hand in London to
influence Lucy when he was at his club playing bridge and unable to look
after her. Yes; it was very satisfactory, and well worth coming down day
earlier for.

He wound up his watch, standing before the last glimmerings of the fire,
and felt quite good-humoured again. More than good-humoured,--refreshed
and exhilarated, as though he had had a cold bath and a thorough
rub-down. Now for bed and his little Love. What simple things a man
wanted,--only his woman and peace.

Wemyss finished winding his watch, stretched himself, yawned, and then
went slowly upstairs, switching off the lights as he went.

In the bedroom there was a night-light burning, and Lucy had fallen
asleep, tired of waiting for Aunt Dot to come and say good-night, but
she woke when he came in.

'Is that you, Aunt Dot?' she murmured, even through her sleepiness sure
it must be, for Everard would have turned on the light.

Wemyss, however, didn't want her to wake up and begin asking questions,
so he refrained from turning on the light.

'No, it's your Everard,' he said, moving about on tiptoe. 'Sh-sh, now.
Go to sleep again like a good little girl.'

Through her sleepiness she knew that voice of his; it meant one of
his pleased moods. How sweet of him to be taking such care not to
disturb her ... dear Everard ... he and Aunt Dot must have made friends
then ... how glad she was ... wonderful little Aunt Dot ... before
dinner he was angry, and she had been so afraid ... afraid ... what a
relief ... how glad....

But Lucy was asleep again, and the next thing she knew was Everard's arm
being slid under her shoulders and she being drawn across the bed and
gathered to his breast.

'Who's my very own baby?' she heard him saying; and she woke up just
enough sleepily to return his kiss.


THE END


*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Vera" ***

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